Our Kind of Traitor Read Online Free Page A

neck: another glint, another distraction.
    But Dima, to Gail’s surprise, was not, at the moment of her entry, the main event, she said. Arranged on the spectators’ stand behind him was a mixed – and to her eye weird – assembly of children and adults.
    ‘Like a bunch of gloomy waxworks,’ she protested. ‘It wasn’t just their overdressed presence at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. It was their total silence and their sullenness. I took a seat on the empty bottom row and thought, Christ, what is this? A people’s tribunal, or a church parade, or what ?’
    Even the children seemed estranged from each other. They caught her eye at once. Children did. She counted four of them.
    ‘Two mopy-looking little girls of around five and seven in dark frocks and sunhats squeezed together beside a buxom black woman who was apparently some sort of minder,’ she said, determined not to let her feelings run ahead of her before time. ‘And two flaxen-haired teenaged boys in freckles and tennis gear. And all looking so down in the mouth you’d think they’d been kicked out of bed and dragged there as a punishment.’
    As to the adults, they were just so alien , so oversized and so other , that they could have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon, she went on. And it wasn’t only their town clothes or 1970s hairstyles. Or the fact that the women despite the heat were dressed for darkest winter. It was their shared gloom.
    ‘Why’s nobody talking?’ she whispered to Mark, who had materialized uninvited in the seat beside her.
    Mark shrugged. ‘Russian.’
    ‘But Russians talk all the time!’
    Not these Russians, Mark said. Most of them had flown in over the last few days and still had to get used to being in the Caribbean.
    ‘Something’s happened up there,’ he said, nodding across the bay. ‘According to the buzz, they’ve got some big family powwow going on, not all of it friendly. Don’t know what they do for their personal hygiene. Half the water system’s shot.’
    She picked out two fat men, one wearing a brown Homburg hat who was murmuring into a mobile, the other a tartan tam-o’-shanter with a red bobble on the top.
    ‘Dima’s cousins,’ said Mark. ‘Everybody’s somebody’s cousin round here. Perm they come from.’
    ‘Perm?’
    ‘Perm, Russia. Not the hairdo, darling. The town.’
    Go up a level and there were the flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it. Dima’s sons, twins, said Mark. And yes, now that Gail looked at them again, she saw a likeness: burly chests, straight backs, and droopy brown bedroom eyes that were already turning covetously towards her.
    She took a quick, silent breath and released it. She was approaching what in legal discourse would have been her golden-bullet question, the one that was supposed to reduce the witness to instant rubble. So was she now going to reduce herself to rubble? But when she resumed speaking, she was gratified to hear no quaver in the voice coming back to her from the brick wall, no faltering or other telltale variation:
    ‘And sitting demurely apart from everybody – demonstratively apart, one would almost have thought – there was this really rather stunning girl of fifteen or sixteen, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders and a school blouse and a navy blue school skirt over her knees, and she didn’t seem to belong to anyone . So I asked Mark who she was. Naturally.’
    Very naturally, she decided with relief, having listened to herself. Not a raised eyebrow round the table. Bravo, Gail.
    ‘“Her name is Natasha,” Mark informed me. “A flower waiting to be plucked,” if I’d pardon his French. “Dima’s daughter but not Tamara’s. Apple of her father’s eye.”’
    And what was the beautiful Natasha, daughter to Dima but not Tamara, doing at seven in the morning when she was supposed to be watching her father playing tennis? Gail asked her audience. Reading a leatherbound tome that she clutched like a