Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carre'

Author:John Le Carre'
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780670919024
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (UK)
Published: 2010-09-15T11:20:15+00:00

10

Hector has for once taken a vow of silence: which is to say that, released from his mawkish technical preoccupations, he is sitting back in his chair and allowing the baritone-voiced Russian news commentator to do his work for him. Like Luke, Hector is a convert to the Russian language – and, with reservations, the Russian soul. Like Luke, each time he watches the film that is running, he is by his own admission awestruck in the presence of the classic, timeless, all-Russian, bare-faced whopping lie.

And the Moscow-based television news service can manage very well on its own, without help from Hector or anybody else. The baritone voice is more than capable of imparting its revulsion at the grisly tragedy it is recounting: this senseless drive-by shooting, this wanton cutting-down of a brilliant and devoted Russian couple from Perm in their very prime of life! Little had the victims known, when they decided to visit their beloved homeland from distant Italy where they were based, that their journey of the soul would end here in the ivy-clad graveyard of the ancient seminary they had always loved, with its onion domes and thuja trees, set on a hillside outside Moscow at the edge of gently swelling forest:

On this dark, unseasonable afternoon in May, all Moscow is in mourning for two blameless Russians and their two small daughters who, by the mercy of God, were not present in the car when their parents were shot to pieces by terrorist elements of our society.

See the shattered windows and bullet-riddled doors, the burned-out carcass of a once-noble Mercedes car tossed on to its side between silver birch trees, the innocent Russian blood mingling in brutal close-up with the fuel oil on the tarmac; and the disfigured faces of the victims themselves.

The outrage, the commentator assures us, has aroused the justified anger of all responsible Moscow citizens. When will this menace end? they ask. When will decent Russians be free to travel their own roads without being gunned down by marauding bands of Chechen desperadoes bent on spreading terror and mayhem?

Mikhail Arkadievich – rising international oil and metals trader! Olga L’vovna – selflessly engaged in procuring charitable food supplies on behalf of Russia’s needy! Loving parents of little Katya and Irina! Pure Russians, homesick for the Motherland they will never leave again!

Against the rising tide of the commentator’s indignation a crawling column of black limousines escorts a glass-sided hurdy-gurdy up the wooded hillside to the seminary gates. The procession halts, car doors fly open as young men in dark designer suits leap out and form ranks to accompany the coffins. The scene changes to a grim-faced Deputy Chief of Police in full uniform and medals posed rigidly at an inlaid desk surrounded by testimonials and photographs of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin:

Let us take comfort in the knowledge that one Chechen at least has already voluntarily confessed to the crime,

he tells us, and the camera holds his face long enough for us to share his outrage.

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