'If I wanna take Tamara a walk, I gonna take her,' he growled. 'I see a beautiful mountain, I wanna show her. This isn't fucking Kolyma. You tell this to Dick, hear me, Professor?'
For the shallow climb up the concrete path to the benches that overlooked the valley, Tamara decided she needed a wheelchair. Ollie was sent off to find one. With her hennaed hair, splurged lipstick and dark glasses, she resembled some necromancer's artefact, and Dima in his boiler suit and woollen ski cap was no prettier. But in a community inured to every kind of human aberration, they made some sort of ideal elderly couple as Dima pushed Tamara slowly up the hill behind the house to show her the Staubbach Falls and Lauterbrunnen Valley in all their glory.
And if Natasha accompanied them, which she sometimes did, it was no longer as the hated love-child sired by Dima and inflicted on Tamara after she was ejected half-mad from prison, but as their loving and obedient daughter, whether natural or adopted was no longer relevant. But mostly, Natasha read her books or sought out her father when he was alone, blandishing him, stroking his bald head and kissing it as if he were her child.
Perry and Gail too were integral parts of this newly constituted family that was forming: with Gail forever thinking up new activities for the girls, introducing them to the cows in the meadows, marching them off to watch Hobelkase being planed in the cheese shop, or looking for deer and squirrels in the woods; while Perry played the boys' admired team leader and lightning-rod for their surplus energy. Only when Gail proposed an early-morning four at tennis with the boys did Perry uncharacteristically demur. After the match from hell in Paris, he confessed, he needed time to recover.
*
The concealment of Dima and his troupe was only one of Luke's accumulating anxieties. Waiting out the nights in his upper room for Hector's random bulletins, he had too much time to assemble the evidence that their presence in the village was attracting unwelcome attention, and, in his many sleepless hours, to concoct conspiracy theories that, when morning came, had an uncomfortable ring of reality.
He worried about his identity as Brabazon, and whether the Bellevue's diligent Herr Direktor had by now made the connection between Brabazon's inspection of the hotel's amenities and the two battered Russians at the foot of the staircase; and whether from there, with police assistance, investigations had progressed to a certain BMW parked under a beech tree at Grindelwald Grund railway station.
His most drastic scenario, prompted in part by Dima's light-hearted reconstruction in the car, ran as follows:
One of the bodyguards – probably the cadaverous philosopher -manages to haul himself up the staircase and hammer on the locked door.
Or perhaps Ollie's speculative reading of the emergency door's electronics was a little too speculative after all.
Either way, the alarm is raised and news of the fracas reaches the ears of the better-informed guests at the Arena apero in the Salon d'Honneur: Dima's bodyguards have been attacked, Dima has vanished.
Now everything is in motion at once. Emilio dell Oro alerts the Seven Clean Envoys, who take to their mobiles and alert their vory brothers, who in turn alert the Prince in his castle.
Emilio alerts his Swiss-banker friends, who in turn alert their friends in high places in the Swiss administration, not excluding the police and security services, whose first duty in life is to preserve the integrity of Switzerland's hallowed bankers, and arrest anyone who impugns it.
Emilio dell Oro further alerts Aubrey Longrigg, Bunny Popham and de Salis, who alert whomever they alert, see below.
The Russian Ambassador in Berne receives urgent instructions from Moscow, fuelled by the Prince, to demand the release of the bodyguards before they can sing, and more specifically to track down Dima and return him post-haste to his country of origin.
The Swiss authorities, who until now have been happy to provide sanctuary for Dima the wealthy financier, instigate a nationwide manhunt for Dima the fugitive criminal.
But there is a twist even to this lugubrious tale and, try as he may, Luke cannot unravel it. By what trail of circumstance, suspicion or hard Intelligence, did the two bodyguards present themselves at the Bellevue Palace Hotel after the second signing? Who sent them? With instructions to do what? And why?
Or put a different way: did the Prince and his brethren already have reason to know, at the time of the second signing, that Dima was proposing to break his unbreakable vory oath and become the bitch of all time?
But when Luke ventures to air these concerns to Dima – albeit in diluted form – he sees them brushed carelessly aside. Hector himself is no more receptive:
'Go that route, we're fucked from day one,' he almost shouts.
*
Move house? Do a night flit to Zurich, Basel, Geneva? For what, finally? To leave a hornet's nest behind? – mystified traders, landlords, the letting agents, the village gossip mill?
'I could get you a few guns, if you're interested,' Ollie suggested, in another vain effort to cheer Luke up. 'According to what I hear, there's not a household in the village isn't bristling with them, whatever the new regulations say. It's for when the Russians come. These people don't know who they've got here, do they?'
'Well, let's hope not,' Luke replied, with a brave smile.
*
For Perry and Gail there was something idyllic in their day-to-day existence, something – as Dima would say wistfully – pure. It was as if they had been landed in a far outpost of humanity, with the mission of exercising a duty of care towards their charges.
If Perry wasn't out scrambling with the boys – Luke having urged him to take out-of-the-way paths, and Alexei having discovered that he did not, after all, suffer from vertigo, it was just that he didn't like Max – he was strolling with Dima in the dusk, or sitting beside him on a bench at the edge of the forest, watching him glower into the valley with the same intensity that, crammed into the pepper-pot crow's-nest at Three Chimneys, he had broken off his monologue and glowered into the darkness, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, taken a pull of vodka and gone on glowering. Sometimes he demanded to be alone in the woods with his pocket recorder while Ollie or Luke kept covert watch from a distance. But he kept the cassettes to himself as part of his insurance policy.
The days, however many there had been, had aged him, Perry noticed. Perhaps the enormity of his betrayal was coming home to him. Perhaps, as he stared into the eternity, or murmured secretively into his tape recorder, he was searching for some kind of inner reconciliation. His demonstrative tenderness towards Tamara seemed to suggest this. Perhaps a revived vory instinct towards religion had paved his way to her:
'My Tamara, when she die, God gonna be deaf already, she pray so fucking hard to him,' he remarked proudly, leaving Perry with the impression that, regarding his own redemption, he was less sanguine.
Perry marvelled also at Dima's forbearance towards him, which seemed to grow in inverse proportion to his contempt for Luke's half-promises, no sooner made than regretfully withdrawn.
'Don't you worry, Professor. One day we all be happy, hear me? God gonna fix the whole shit,' he declared, strolling along the footpath with his hand resting proprietorially on his shoulder: 'Viktor and Alexei think you're some kinda fucking hero. Maybe one day they make you vor.'
Perry was not deceived by the roar of laughter that followed this suggestion. For days now he had seen himself increasingly as the inheritor of Dima's line of deep male friendships: with the dead Nikita, who had made him a man; with the murdered Misha, his disciple, whom to his shame he had failed to protect; and with all the fighters and men of iron who had ruled over his incarceration in Kolyma and beyond.