And you’ve shrunk, thought Oliver, briefly furious to have his daughter taken over and paraded in this way. You have revealed the full scale of your immense, infinite nothingness. At the brink of death, you have nothing to plead but your stupefying triviality.
But none of this was detectable in Oliver’s behavior. Agreeing, encouraging, raising his glass to Tinatin, though not to Hoban, stepping blithely between the kitchen and the table and the two old men seated at the fire, he was bent solely upon creating a mood of circumspect good fellowship. Only Hoban, nursing his witch’s telephone and seated on a bench between two sullen cohorts, showed no sign of entering the spirit of the party. But his embittered, brooding presence could not discourage Oliver. Nothing could. The magician was coming alive. The illusionist, the eternal pacifier and deflector of ridicule, the dancer on eggshells and creator of impossible karma was answering the call of the footlights. The Oliver of the rain-swept bus shelters, children’s hospitals and Salvation Army hostels was performing for his life and Tiger’s, while Tinatin cooked, and Yevgeny half listened and counted his misfortunes in the flames, and Hoban and his fellow devils dreamed their sour mischief and pondered their dwindling options. And Oliver knew his audience. He empathized with its disarray, its stunned senses and confused allegiances. He knew how often in his own life, at its absolutely lowest moments, he would have given everything he had for one lousy conjuror with a stuffed raccoon.
Even Yevgeny, little by little, was unable to withstand his magic. “Why did you not write to us, Post Boy?” he called reproachfully from beside the fire when the prodigal had once more replenished his glass. And another time: “Why did you give up our beloved Georgian?” To both of which questions Oliver replied disarmingly that he was but flesh, he had been unfaithful, but he had learned the error of his ways. And from these seemingly innocent exchanges, a kind of madness grew, a shared illusion of normality. The food ready, Oliver summoned everyone to table, and placed Yevgeny unprotesting at its head. For a while the old man sat there, head down, lowering at the food. Then as if the sight had restored him, he hauled himself upright, and clenched his fists and braced his broad chest, and bellowed for more wine. And it was Hoban, not Oliver, whom Tinatin dispatched to fetch it.
“What must I do with you, Post Boy?” Yevgeny demanded, as tears appeared at the corners of his nearly vanished eyes. “Your father killed my brother. Tell me!”
But Oliver with perilous sincerity contradicted him: “Yevgeny, I am truly sorry that Mikhail died. But my father didn’t kill him. My father’s not a traitor and I’m not the son of one. I don’t understand why you’re treating him like an animal.” He shot a covert glance at Hoban, seated impassively between his uneasy protectors. And Oliver noticed that his telephone was nowhere in sight, which led him to the happy thought that Hoban had run out of friends or spells. “Yevgeny, I think we should enjoy your hospitality and leave with your blessing as soon as it’s light,” he said.
And Yevgeny seemed disposed to sympathize with this suggestion—until Tiger, unable to resist hogging the conversation, ruined the moment: “Let me handle this one, if you don’t mind, Oliver. Our hosts—largely, I suspect, encouraged by our friend Alix Hoban here—take a rather different view—no, don’t interrupt me, please— their position being that since I have delivered myself into their hands, they are in a twofold position of advantage. One—not while I’m speaking, Oliver, thank you—one, to persuade me to sign everything over to them, which is what they have been demanding for months. Two, to take vengeance for the killing of Mikhail on the totally erroneous grounds that I, with the connivance of Randy Massingham of all people, am the author of it. Nobody—no member of my House or family—is in the remotest way guilty of such an act. However, as you see for yourself, my denials have so far fallen on deaf ears.”
Which in turn prompted Hoban to restate the charge, even if his awful voice lacked something of its customary arrogance. “Your father screwed us all ways up,” he declared. “He cut a side deal with Massingham. He cut a deal with your British secret police. Killing Mikhail was part of the deal. Yevgeny Ivanovich wants vengeance and he wants his money.”
Yet again Tiger blundered recklessly into the gap, using Oliver as his jury. “That is the most utter nonsense, Oliver. You know as well as I do that I have long regarded Randy Massingham as a bad apple, and if I am at fault at all in this matter, which I contest, it is because I have been too soft on Randy for too long. The axis of conspiracy is not between Massingham and myself, but between Massingham and Hoban. Yevgeny, I beg you to assert your authority here—”
But Oliver the grown man had already cut him short. “Tell us, Alix,” he suggested, with no more emphasis than if he were seeking enlightenment on some semantic point, “when did you last watch a game of football?”
Yet Oliver felt no enmity toward Hoban as he asked this. He did not see himself as some shining knight or great detective unmasking the evildoer. He was a performer, and for a performer the only enemy is the one who doesn’t clap. His overriding aim was to magic his father out of here and say sorry to him if he felt it, though he wasn’t sure he did. He needed to dab the bruises from his father’s face and get him a tooth job and put a pressed suit on him and shave him and deliver him to Brock, and after Brock, to sit him behind his half-acre desk in Curzon Street; to set him on his feet but say, “There you are, you’re on your own, we’re quits.” Beside these concerns, Hoban was an incidental nastiness, the consequence and not the origin of his father’s folly. So he told it without histrionics, calmly, much in the way Zoya herself had told it to him, right down to the sausage and the vodka at halftime, and little Paul’s pride at having both his parents there, and Mikhail’s mistrust of Alix, which Zoya’s presence fatally overcame. He spoke reasonably, never lifting his voice or pointing a finger, but preserving with all the vocal tricks he knew the glasslike delicacy of the illusion. And as he spoke he was able to watch the truth gradually descend on them: on Hoban, white-faced, immobile and calculating, and on Hoban’s uneasy consorts; on Yevgeny, made strong again by Oliver’s ministrations; on Tinatin, as she rose to her feet and glided away to the darkness, trailing her hand along her husband’s shoulders to reassure him as she passed; and on Tiger, who was hearing him from within a cocoon of faked superiority while his fingers absently explored the outlines of his battered face, reassuring himself of his identity. And when Oliver had completed his account of the football match, and given time for its significance to resonate in Yevgeny’s memory, he was so moved by his own call to honesty that he was halfway to tossing aside all strategy and confessing to his own betrayals also, to the assembly at large and not just Hoban. But mercifully a number of extraneous happenings were on hand to deflect him from this rash course.
First came the unexpected drone of a helicopter passing overhead—the distinctive gub-gubbing noise of twin rotaries. It faded, and nothing more was heard until a second followed. And though nowhere in the world is silent anymore, and helicopters and other powered aircraft are nightly visitors to the mysterious Caucasus, Oliver felt enough hope stir him at the sound of them to be disappointed by their passing. Hoban was protesting, of course—ranting was a better word—but he was protesting in Georgian and Yevgeny was gainsaying him. Also Tinatin had returned from whatever corner of the house she had retired to and she was carrying a handgun of the same design, it appeared to Oliver, as the one that Mirsky had offered him in Istanbul. But this event was in turn overtaken by the rush of Hoban’s two companions to escape the room—one by the main door to the veranda and the other by way of a window between the fireplace and the kitchen. Both skidded and collapsed on the floor before they reached their goals. Immediately after these events, the reason for them became apparent: namely, that dark figures had been entering the room at the same time as the two men were trying to leave it, with the result that the dark figures, with their dark instruments, won the day.
But still nobody had spoken or fired an audible shot, until t
he room lit up and exploded to one finite and incontrovertible bang, not of a thunder flash or a stun grenade, but of Tinatin’s handgun, which she was directing at Hoban with great competence, using both hands in a golf professional’s grip. And the effect of this piece of home magic was that Hoban was now wearing a big bright ruby at the center of his forehead and his eyes were wide open in surprise. And while this was going on Brock was taking Tiger into a corner and advising him, in the simplest and most energetic Merseyside phrases, of the unhappy course his life would follow if he did not pledge his unstinted cooperation. And Tiger was hearing him, as he would say. Hearing him with respectful attention, with his hands to his sides and his shoulders dropped, and his eyebrows raised for greater receptivity.
What am I seeing? Oliver wondered. What am I understanding now that I didn’t understand before? The answer was as clear to him as the question. That he had found it, and it didn’t exist. He had arrived at the last, most hidden room of his search, he had prized open the most top-secret box, and it was empty. Tiger’s secret was that he had no secret.
More men were pouring through the windows, and clearly they were not Brock’s because they were Russian, and shouting in Russian, and they were led by a bearded Russian, and it was this bearded leader who, to Oliver’s disgust, hit Yevgeny across the side of the head with some kind of blackjack, causing copious bleeding. But the old man seemed scarcely to notice or care. He was on his feet, his hands bound behind him with some kind of instant tourniquet, and it was Tinatin who was screaming at them to leave her husband alone, although Tinatin couldn’t do much to help either, because they had disarmed her, and thrown her face-downward to the ground, and she was seeing everything sideways, from boot level, where, to his astonishment, Oliver now joined her. Stepping forward to remonstrate with Yevgeny’s bearded assailant, he felt his feet being kicked from under him. His head flew over his feet, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back on the floor and a steelhard heel was being driven so viciously into his stomach that the lights went out and he thought he was dead. But he wasn’t, because when the lights came on again, the man who had kicked him was lying on the ground, clutching his groin and groaning, and he had been put there, as Oliver quickly deduced, by Aggie, brandishing a submachine gun and wearing a panther suit and Apache war paint.
Indeed, he might not have recognized her, had it not been for her rich Glaswegian accent delivered with schoolmarmish emphasis: “Oliver, on your feet, please, stand up, Oliver, now!” And when that had no effect on him she flung down her weapon and part hauled him and part willed him to his feet, where he stood swaying and worrying about Carmen and whether all the shouting was going to wake her up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My special thanks to Alan Austin, magician and entertainer, of Torquay, Devon; to Sükrü Yarcan of the Tourism Administration Program, Bo´gaçi University, Istanbul; to Temur and Giorgi Barklaia of Mingrelia; to the distinguished Phil Connelly, latterly of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Investigations Service, and to a Swiss banker whom I may only call Peter. George Hewitt, professor of Caucasian Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has once more spared me many blushes.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
JULY 1998
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