Our Game [antikvár]

AcknowledgmentsAcademics get a rough time in this book, but that's Larr/s fault. My own debt to them is considerable: to Dr George Hewitt of the School of Oriental African Studies, and Honorary Consul of Abkhazia; to Marie Bennigsen Broxup, Editor of Central Asian Survey, to Robert Chenciner of St Anthony's College, Oxford; and to Federico Várese of Nuffield College, Oxford. Major Colin Gillespie and his wife Sue of Wootton Vineyard in Somerset make much better wine than Tim Cranmer ever did; John Goldsmith guided me through the corridors of Winchester College; Edward Nowell, master jeweller and antique dealer of Wells, opened his Aladdin's cave to me. All through the writing of this book I was lucky in my choice of friends and strangers alike.John le Carré ComwaU, December 1994.CHAPTER ONELarry went officially missing from the world on the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven, when he failed to deliver his opening lecture of the new academic year.I am able to set the scene exactly because it was not so very long ago, in the same dreary Bath weather, that I had dragged Larry down to see the wretched place for the first time. To this day I have the most accusing memory of the brutálist slab barracks closing in on him like the walls of his new confinement. And of Larry's ever youthful back walking reproachfully away from me down the concrete canyon like a man going to his Nemesis. If I had had a son, I thought as I stared after him, this was how it would feel to be dumping him at his first boarding school.'Hey, Timbo,' he whispers over his shoulder, the way Larry can speak to you from miles away.'Yes, Larry.''This is it, is it?''This is what?''The future. Where it all ends. Leftover life.''It's a new beginning,' I say loyally.13