Our Game

"Something come back to you, does it, sir?"

"Well, dear me, yes, I suppose it does. There were times when Larry with a telephone could make one's life utter hell. Ring you up all hours of the day or night. He wasn't singling you out; he rang everyone in his phone book."

I laughed again, and Bryant laughed with me, while Luck the puritan went on brooding at the flames.

"We all know one of those, don't we, sir?" Bryant said. "Drama merchants, I call them, no disrespect. They get themselves a problem—a fight with the boyfriend or girlfriend; should they buy this incredible house they've just seen from the top of a bus?—and they're not happy till they've sucked you in. I think it's my wife who attracts them in our household, to be frank. I haven't the patience myself. When was the last time Dr. Pettifer came up with one, then, sir?"

"With one what?"

"A drama, sir. A what I call a wobbly."

"Oh, way back."

"Months again, was it?"

I again affected to rummage in my memory. There are two golden rules to being interrogated, and I had already flouted both of them. The first is never volunteer extraneous detail. The second is never tell a direct lie unless you are able to stick it out to the bitter end.

"Perhaps if you could describe to us the nature of the drama, sir, that might enable us to put a date on it, mightn't it?" he suggested in the tone of somebody proposing a family game.

My dilemma was acute. In my previous incarnation it was the accepted wisdom that the police, unlike ourselves, made little use of microphones and phone taps. Their misnomered discreet enquiries were confined to pestering neighbours, tradesmen, and bank managers, but stopped short of our private preserve of electronic surveillance. Or so we thought. I decided to take refuge in the distant past.

"So far as I remember, it was the occasion when Larry was taking some kind of public farewell from left-wing socialism and wished his friends to be part of the process," I said.

Still seated before the fire, Luck laid a long hand to his cheek, seeming to nurse a neuralgic pain. "Is this Russian socialism we're talking?" he demanded in his surly voice.

"Whatever kind you like. He was deradicalising himself—that was his expression—and he needed his friends to watch him do it."

"Now, when would that have been, exactly, Mr. Cranmer, sir?" asked Bryant from my other side.

"A couple of years ago. More. It was while he was still cleaning up his act before applying for the job at the university."

"November 'ninety-two," said Luck.

"I beg your pardon?"

"If we're talking the Doctor's public renunciation of radical socialism, we're talking his article entitled 'Death of an Experiment,' published Socialist Review November 'ninety-two. The Doctor linked his decision to an analysis of what he termed the underground continuum of Russian expansionism whether it was conducted under the tsarist, Communist, or, as of now, federalist flag. He also referred to the West's newfound moral orthodoxy, which he likened to the early phases of Communist social dogma without the fundamental idealism to go with it. One or two of his left-wing academic colleagues considered that article a rather hefty act of betrayal. Did you?"

"I had no opinion of it."

"Did you discuss it with him?"

"No. I congratulated him.”

“why?"

"Because that was what he wanted."

"Do you always tell people what they want?"

"If I'm humouring somebody who is being a bore, Mr. Luck, and I want to get on with something else, yes, I very likely do," I said, and ventured a glance at my French striking clock in its glass dome. But Luck was not so easily confounded.

"And November nineteen ninety-two—when Pettifer wrote this famous article—that would have been about the time you were retiring from whatever it was you were doing in London, I take it?"

I didn't like Luck drawing parallels between our two lives, and I detested his assertive tone.

"Probably."

"Did you approve of him renouncing socialism?"

"Are you asking me to tell you what my politics are, Mr. Luck?"

"I was merely thinking it must have been slightly risky for you, knowing him during the Cold War period. You being a civil servant and him, in those days, as you have said this very moment, a revolutionary socialist."

"I never made any secret of my acquaintance with Dr. Pettifer. It was no crime that we were contemporaries at university or went to the same school, though you appear to think otherwise. It was certainly never an issue with my department."

"Ever meet any of his Soviet-bloc friends? Any of the Russians, Poles, Czechs, and so forth that he knocked around with?"