Our Kind of Traitor Read Online Free Page B

shield of virtue on her lap.
    ‘But absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,’ Gail insisted. And as a throwaway: ‘I mean, seriously beautiful.’ And then she thought: Oh Christ, I’m beginning to sound like a dyke when all I want is to sound unconcerned.
    But once again, neither Perry nor her inquisitors seemed to have noticed anything out of tune.
    ‘So where do I find Tamara who isn’t Natasha’s mother?’ she asked Mark, severely, taking the opportunity to edge away from him.
    ‘Two rows up on your left. Very pious lady. Known locally as Mrs Nun.’
    She did a careless swing round and homed in on a spectral woman draped from head to toe in black. Her hair, also black, was shot with white and bound in a bun. Her mouth, locked in a downward curve, seemed never to have smiled. She wore a mauve chiffon scarf.
    ‘And on her bosom, this bishop-grade Orthodox gold cross with an extra bar,’ Gail exclaimed. ‘Hence the Mrs Nun, presumably.’ And as an afterthought: ‘But wow , did she have presence. A real scene-stealer’ – shades of her acting parents – ‘you really felt the willpower. Even Perry did.’
    ‘Later,’ Perry warned, avoiding her eye. ‘They don’t want us to be wise after the event.’
    Well, I’m not allowed to be wise before it either, am I? she had half a mind to shoot back at him, but in her relief at having successfully negotiated the hurdle of Natasha, let it go.
    Something about the immaculate little Luke was seriously distracting her: the way she kept catching his eye without meaning to; the way he caught hers. She’d wondered at first whether he was gay, until she spotted him eyeing the gap in her blouse where a button hadopened. It’s the loser’s gallantry in him, she decided. It’s his air of fighting to the last man, when the last man is himself. In the years when she was waiting for Perry, she’d slept with quite a few men, and there’d been one or two she’d said yes to out of kindness, simply to prove to them that they were better than they thought. Luke reminded her of them.
    *
    Limbering up for the match with Dima, Perry by contrast had scarcely bothered with the spectators at all, he claimed, talking intently to his big hands set flat on the table before him. He knew they were up there, he’d given them a wave of his racquet and got nothing back. Mainly, he was too busy putting in his contact lenses, tightening his shoelaces, smearing on sun cream, worrying about Mark giving Gail a hard time, and generally wondering how quickly he could win and get out. He was also being interrogated by his opponent, standing three feet away:
    ‘They bother you?’ Dima inquired in an earnest undertone. ‘My supporters’ club? You want I tell them go home?’
    ‘Of course not,’ Perry replied, still smarting from his encounter with the bodyguards. ‘They’re your friends, presumably.’
    ‘You British?’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘English British? Welsh? Scottish?’
    ‘Just plain English, actually.’
    Selecting a bench, Perry dumped his tennis bag on it, the one he hadn’t let the bodyguards look inside, and yanked the zip. He fished a couple of sweatbands from his bag, one for his head, one for his wrist.
    ‘You a priest?’ Dima asked, with the same earnestness.
    ‘Why? D’you need one?’
    ‘Doctor? Some kinda medic?’
    ‘Not a doctor either, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Lawyer?’
    ‘I just play tennis.’
    ‘Banker?’
    ‘God forbid,’ Perry replied irritably, and fiddled with a battered sunhat before slinging it back into the bag.
    But actually he felt more than irritable. He’d been rolled and didn’t care for being rolled. Rolled by the pro and rolled by the bodyguards, if he’d let them. And all right he hadn’t let them, but their presence on the court – they’d established themselves like line judges at either end – was quite enough to keep his anger going. More pertinently he had been rolled by Dima himself, and the fact that Dima had press-ganged a bunch of