Moscow Rules

stainless steel attaché and handed Gabriel a photograph. It showed Alistair Leach strolling the pavements of Piccadilly with a spinsterish woman at his side.
     
     
    “Who is she?”
     
     
    “Rosemary Gibbons. She’s an administrator in the Old Master Paintings department at Sotheby’s. For obvious reasons, both personal and professional, they keep their relationship highly secret. As far as we can tell, it’s strictly platonic. To tell you the truth, my watchers are actually rooting for poor Alistair to take it to the next step. Abigail is an absolute fiend, and his two children can’t bear the sight of him.”
     
     
    “Where are they now?”
     
     
    “The wife and children?”
     
     
    “Leach and Rosemary,” Gabriel answered impatiently.
     
     
    “A little wine bar in Jermyn Street. Quiet table in the far corner. Very cozy.”
     
     
    “You’ll get me a picture, won’t you, Graham? A little something to keep in my back pocket in case he digs in his heels?”
     
     
    Seymour ran a hand through his gray locks, then nodded.
     
     
    “I’d like to move on him tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “What’s his schedule like?”
     
     
    “Appointments all morning at Christie’s, then he’s attending a meeting of something called the Raphael Club. We have a researcher checking it out.”
     
     
    “You can tell your researcher to stand down, Graham. I can assure you the members of the Raphael Club pose no threat to anyone except themselves.”
     
     
    “What is it?”
     
     
    “A monthly gathering of art dealers, auctioneers, and curators. They do nothing more seditious than drink far too much wine and bemoan the shifting fortunes of their trade.”
     
     
    “Shall we do it before the meeting or after?”
     
     
    “ After , Graham. Definitely after.”
     
     
    “You don’t happen to know where and when these gentlemen gather, do you?”
     
     
    “Green’s Restaurant. One o’clock.”
     

 
    29
     
     
    ST. JAME’S, LONDON
     
     
    The members of the little-known but much-maligned Raphael Club began trickling into the enchanted premises of Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar, Duke Street, St. James’s, shortly before one the following afternoon. Oliver Dimbleby, a lecherous independent dealer from Bury Street, arrived early, but then Oliver always liked to have a gin or two at the bar alone, just to get the mood right. The unscrupulous Roddy Hutchinson came next, followed by Jeremy Crabbe, the tweedy director of Old Master Paintings from Bonhams. A few minutes later came a pair of curators, one from the Tate and another from the National. Then, at one sharp, Julian Isherwood, the Raphael Club’s founder and beating heart, came teetering up the front steps, looking hungover as usual.
     
     
    By 1:20, the guest of honor—at least in the estimation of Gabriel and Graham Seymour, who were sitting across the street from Green’s in the back of an MI5 surveillance van—had not yet arrived. Seymour telephoned the MI5 listeners and asked whether there was any recent activity on Leach’s work line or his mobile. “It’s the Beast,” explained the listener. “She’s giving him a list of errands he’s to run on the way home from work.” At 1:32, the listener called back again to say that Leach’s line was now inactive, and, at 1:34, a surveillance team in King Street reported that he had just left Christie’s in “a highly agitated state.” Gabriel spotted him as he rounded the corner, a reedlike figure with rosy patches on his cheeks and two wiry tufts of hair above his ears that flapped like gray wings as he walked. A team inside Green’s reported that Leach had joined the proceedings and that the white Burgundy was now flowing.
     
     
    The luncheon was three hours and fifteen minutes in length, which was slightly longer than usual, but then it was June and June was a rather slow time of the year for all of them. The final wine count was four bottles of Sancerre, four bottles of a Provençal rosé, and three more bottles of an excellent Montrachet. The bill, when it finally arrived, caused something of a commotion, but this, too, was Raphael ritual. Estimated at “somewhere north of fifteen hundred pounds” by the team inside the restaurant, it was collected by means of a passed plate, with Oliver Dimbleby, tubbiest of the club’s members, cracking the whip. As usual, Jeremy Crabbe was short of cash and was granted a bridge loan by Julian Isherwood. Alistair Leach