The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  And everything was running smoothly until Day Three, when one small unknown Arab man in a black overcoat with velvet collars appeared silently on our horizon. Or more accurately, in the ladies’ lingerie department of a great Knightsbridge department store, where the Panda and her attendants were picking their way through a stack of frilly white undergarments spread over the glass counter. For the Panda also had her spies. And word had reached her that, on the day before, the Fat Boy himself had brooded fondly over the same articles, and even ordered a few dozen to be sent to an address in Paris where a favoured lady friend constantly awaited him in subsidised luxury.

  Day Three, I repeat, and the morale of our three-strong unit under strain. Paul was Paul Skordeno, an inward man with a pocked complexion and a talent for ferocious invective. Nancy told me he was under a cloud, but wouldn’t say what for.

  “He hit a girl, Ned,” she said, but I think now that she meant more than merely hit.

  Nancy herself was all of five feet tall and in appearance a kind of licensed bag-lady. For her standard, as she called it, she wore lisle stockings and sensible rubber-soled walking shoes, which she seldom changed. What more she needed—scarves, raincoats, woollen hats of different colours—she took in a plastic carrier.

  On surveillance duty our section worked eight-hour shifts always in the same formation, Nancy and Paul playing forward, young Ned trailing along behind as sweep. When I asked Skordeno whether we could vary the formation, he told me to get used to what I’d got. On our first day we had followed Fat Boy to Sandhurst, where a lunch had been organised in his honour. The three of us ate egg-and-chips in a café close to the main gates while Skordeno railed first against the Arabs, then against the Western exploitation of them, then to my distress against the Fifth Floor, whom he described as Fascist golfers.

  “You a Freemason, College?”

  I assured him I was not.

  “Well, you’d best hurry up and join then, hadn’t you? Haven’t you noticed the saucy way Personnel shakes your hand? You’ll never get to Berlin if you’re not a Mason, College.”

  Day Two had been spent hanging around Mount Street while Fat Boy had himself measured for a pair of Purdy shotguns, first precariously brandishing a try-gun round the premises, then throwing a tantrum when he discovered he would have to wait two years before they were ready. Paul ordered me twice into the shop while this scene was unfolding, and seemed pleased when I told him the staff were becoming suspicious of my frivolous enquiries.

  “I’d have thought it was your kind of place,” he said, with his skull-like grin. “Huntin’, shootin” and fishin’—they like that on the Fifth Floor, College.”

  The same night had found us sitting three up in a van outside a shuttered whorehouse in South Audley Street, and Head Office in a state of near panic. Fat Boy had only been holed up there two hours when he had telephoned the hotel and ordered his personal doctor to attend immediately. His heart! we thought in alarm. Should we go in? While Head Office dithered, we entertained visions of our quarry dead of a heart attack in the arms of some over-conscientious whore before he had signed the cheque for his obsolete fighter planes. It was not till four o’clock that the listeners laid our fears to rest. Fat Boy had been afflicted by a spell of impotence, they explained, and his doctor had been summoned to inject an aphrodisiac into the royal rump. We returned home at five, Skordeno drunk with anger, but all of us consoled by the knowledge that Fat Boy was due in Luton at midday to attend a grand demonstration of the nearly latest British tank, and we could count on a day’s rest. But our relief was premature.

  “The Panda wants to buy herself some pretties,” Monty announced to us benignly on our arrival in Green Street. “Your lot’s on. Sorry about that, College.”

  Which brings us to the lingerie department of the great Knightsbridge store, and to my moment of glory. Ben, I was think-ing; Ben, I would trade one day of yours for five of mine. Then suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Ben any more and I had ceased to envy him. I had drawn back into the privacy of a doorway and was speaking into the mouthpiece of the cumbersome radio set, which in those days was the best there was. I had selected the channel which gave me a direct line to base. It was the one Skordeno had told me not to use.

  “The Panda’s got a monkey on her back,” I informed Monty in my calmest voice, using the approved watchers’ jargon to describe a mysterious follower. “Five five, black curly hair, heavy moustache, aged forty, black overcoat, rubber-soled black shoes, Arab appearance. He was at the airport when Fat Boy’s plane came in. I remember him. It’s the same man.”

  “Stay on him” came Monty’s laconic reply. “Paul and Nancy stick with the Panda, you stick with the monkey. Which floor?”

  “One.”

  “Stay on him wherever he goes, keep talking to me.”

  “He could be carrying,” I said as my eyes again fixed surreptitiously on the subject of my call.

  “You mean he’s pregnant?”

  I didn’t think that very funny.

  Let me set the scene precisely, for it was more complicated than you may suppose. Our trio was not alone in following the Panda’s retinue on its snail-paced shopping expedition. Wealthy Arab princesses do not arrive unannounced at great Knightsbridge stores. In addition to a pair of floorwalkers in black jackets and striped trousers, two very obvious house detectives had placed themselves at either archway with their feet apart and their hands curled at their sides, ready at any moment to grapple with whirling dervishes. As if that were not enough, Scotland Yard had that morning taken upon itself to provide its own brand of protection in the form of an iron-faced man in a belted raincoat who insisted on placing himself beside the Panda and glowering at anyone who came near. And finally, you must see Paul and Nancy in their Sunday best, their backs turned to everyone while they affected to study trays of negligés, and watched our quarry in the mirrors.

  And all of this again, you understand, set in the hushed and scented privacy of the harem; in a world of flimsy undergarments, deep-pile carpets and languorous half-naked dummies—not to mention those kindly grey-haired lady attendants in black crêpe who, at a certain age, are deemed to have achieved a sufficiently unthreatening demeanour to reside over shrines of female intimacy.

  Other men, I noticed, preferred not to enter the lingerie department at all, or hurried through it with averted gaze. My instinct would have been the same, had it not been for my recognition of this melancholy little man with his black moustache and passionate brown eyes, who unswervingly trailed the Panda’s retinue at fifteen paces. If Monty had not appointed me sweep, I might not have seen him at all—or not then. But it was quickly clear that both he and I, by virtue of our different trades, were obliged to keep the same distance from our target—I with nonchalance, he with a kind of intense and mystical dependence. For his gaze never wavered from her. Even when he was unsighted by a pillar or a customer, he still contrived to crane his dark head this way or that until he had locked her once more in his zealous and—I was now convinced—fanatical gaze.

  I had first sensed this fervour in him when I had spotted him in the arrivals hall at the airport, pressing himself on tiptoe against the long window as he wriggled to get a better view of the royal couple’s approach. I had made nothing so special of him then. I was subjecting everyone to the same critical examination. He had seemed to be just another of the gaggle of diplomats, retainers and hangers-on who formed the royal welcome party. Nevertheless his intensity had struck a chord in me: So this is the Middle East, I had mused as I watched him squeeze his hollowed face against the glass. These are the heathen passions my Service must contain if we are to drive our cars and heat our houses and sell our weaponry in peace.

  The monkey had taken a couple of steps forward and was peering at a cabinet of ribbons. His gait—exactly like that of is namesake—was wide but stealthy; he seemed to move entirely from the knees, in conspiratorial strides. I selected a display of garters next to him and peered into it while I ag
ain furtively examined him for tell-tale bulges round the waist and armpits. His black overcoat was of the classic gunman’s cape: voluminous and without a belt, the kind of coat that covers effortlessly a long-barrelled pistol fitted with a suppressor, or a semi-automatic slung beneath the arm.

  I studied his hands, my own nervously prickling. His left hung loosely at his side, but his right, which looked the stronger, kept travelling towards his chest and withholding, as if he were preparing himself to pluck up courage for the final act.

  A right-handed cross draw, I thought; most likely to the armpit. Our weapons trainers had taught us all the combinations.

  And his eyes—those dark, slow-burning, soulful zealot’s eyes— even in profile they seemed fixed upon the afterlife. Had he sworn vengeance on her? On her household? Had fanatical mullahs promised him a place in Heaven if he did the deed? My knowledge of Islam was scant, and what there was of it was drawn from a couple of background lectures and the novels of P. C. Wren. Yet it was enough to warn me that I was in the presence of a desperate fanatic who counted his own life cheap.

  As to myself, alas, I was unarmed. It was a sore point with me. Watchers would never dream of carrying weapons on normal duty, but covert protection work is a different type of watching, and Paul Skordeno had been allocated a sidearm from Monty’s safe.

  “One’s enough, College,” Monty had told me, with his old man’s smile. “We don’t want you starting World War Three, now do we?”

  All that was left to me, therefore, as I rose and softly followed him again, was to select in advance one of the blows we had been taught to master in our silent-killing classes. Should I count on attacking him from behind—with a rabbit punch?—with a double simultaneous blow over the ears? Either method could kill him instantly, whereas a live one can still be questioned. Then would I do better breaking his right arm first, hoping to take him with his own weapon? Yet if I let him draw, might I myself not go down in a hail of bullets from the several bodyguards around the room?

  She had seen him!

  The Panda had looked straight into the eyes of the monkey, and the monkey had returned her stare!

  Had she recognised him? I was certain she had. But had she recognised his purpose? And was she, perhaps, in some strange turn of Oriental fatalism, preparing herself for death? The lurid possibilities went racing through my mind as I continued to observe their mysterious exchange. Their eyes met, the Panda froze in mid-gesture. Her jewelled, crabby little hands, plundering the clothing on the counter, kept still—and then, as if to his command, slipped passively to her sides. After which she stood motionless, without will, without even the strength to detach herself from his penetrating stare.

  At last, with a forlorn and strangely humble air, she turned away from him, murmured something to her lady companions and, holding out her hand to the counter, released whatever frilly thing she was still clutching in it. She was wearing brown that day—if she had been a man, I would be tempted to say a Franciscan habit—with wide sleeves longer than her arms, and a brown headband bound tightly across her brow.

  I saw her sigh, then slowly and, I was sure, resignedly, she led her entourage towards the archway. After her went her personal body-guard; after him the Scotland Yard policeman. Then came the ladies of her train, followed by the floor-walkers. And finally came Paul and Nancy, who, with a show of indecision, had torn themselves away from their study of the negligés and were sauntering like any shoppers in the party’s wake. Paul, who had surely overheard my conversations with Monty, vouchsafed me not the smallest glance. Nancy, who prided herself on her amateur dramatics, was pretending to pick a marital dispute with him. I tried to see whether Paul had unbuttoned his jacket, for he too favoured the cross draw. But his broad back was turned away from me.

  “All right, College, show me,” said Money brightly into my left ear, appearing beside me as if by magic. How long had he been there? I had no idea. It was past midday and our time for standing down, but this was no moment to change the guard. The monkey was not five yards from us, stepping lightly but determinedly after the Panda.

  “We can take him at the stairs,” I murmured.

  “Speak louder,” Monty advised me, in the same unabashed voice. “Speak normally, no one listens to you. Mutter, mutter out of the corner of your mouth, they think you’ve come to rob the till.”

  Since we were on the first floor, the Panda’s party was sure to take the lift, whether they went up or down. Beside the lift stood a pair of swing doors opening on to what in those days was a stone emergency staircase, rather dank and insanitary, with linoleum treads. My plan, which I outlined to Monty in staccato sentences as we followed the monkey towards the archway, was simplicity itself. As the party approached the lift, Monty and I would close on him from either side, grab an arm each and sweep him into the staircase. We would subdue him with a blow to the groin, remove his weapon, then spirit him to Green Street where we would invite him to make a voluntary statement. In training exercises we had done such things a dozen times—once, to our embarrassment, to an innocent bank clerk who was hurrying home to his wife and family, and whom we had mistaken for a member of the training staff.

  But if Monty heard me, to my frustration he gave no sign of having done so. He was watching the floorwalkers clear a path through the crowd to the lift so that the Panda’s party could ride in privacy. And he was smiling like any casual commoner who stumbles on a glimpse of royalty.

  “She’s going down,” he declared with satisfaction. “Pound to a penny it’s the costume jewellery she’s after. You’d think the Gulfies wouldn’t bother with the artificial stuff, but they can’t get enough of it; they think it’s got to be a bargain. Come on, son. This is fun. Let’s go and take a look.”

  I like to think that even in my perplexity I recognised the excellence of Monty’s tradecraft. The Panda’s exotic entourage, mostly in Arab dress, was arousing lively curiosity among the shoppers. Monty was just another punter, enjoying the spectacle. And yes, he was right again, their destination was the costume jewellery department, as the monkey also had divined, for as we emerged from our lift the monkey scampered ahead of the party to take up a favoured place alongside the glittering displays, his left shoulder nearest to the wall, exactly as required of a right-handed gunman who draws across his chest.

  Yet, far from choosing a strategic position from which to return fire, Monty merely wandered after him, and, having placed himself next to him, beckoned me to join them, and in such a way that I had no alternative but to leave Monty, not the monkey, at the centre of our trio.

  “This is why I always come to Knightsbridge, son,” Monty was explaining, loudly enough for half the floor to hear. “You never know who you’re gong to meet. I brought your mother last time— you remember—we’d gone to the Harrods Food Hall. I thought: ‘Hullo, I know you, you’re Rex Harrison.’ I could have held out my hand and touched him but I didn’t. It’s the crossroads of the world, Knightsbridge is, don’t you agree, sir?”—lifting his hat to the monkey, who smiled wanly in return. “Now I wonder where this lot would be from. Arabs, by the look of them, with the wealth of Solomon at their fingertips. And they don’t even pay taxes, I dare say. Not royalty, well they wouldn’t have to. There isn’t a royal household in the world pays taxes to itself, it wouldn’t be logical. See the big policeman there, son? He’ll be Special Branch, you can tell by his stupid scowl.”

  The Panda’s party meanwhile was distributing itself among the illuminated glass counters while the Panda, in barely concealed agitation, was requiring that the trays be taken out for her inspection. And soon, as in the lingerie department, she was picking out one object after another, turning it critically under the inspection light, then setting it down and taking up another And yet again, as she continued to appraise and relinquish each piece in turn, I saw her worried gaze slip towards us, first to the monkey, then to myself, as if she had seen in me her one hope of protection.

  Yet Monty, when I glanced at h
im for confirmation, was still smiling.

  “That’s exactly what happened in the lingerie department,” I whispered, forgetting his instruction to speak normally.

  But Monty continued his noisy monologue. “But underneath, son—I always say this—underneath, royals or not, they’re the same as what we are, through and through. We’re all born naked, we’re all on our way to the grave. Your wealth is your health, better to be rich in friends than money, I say. We’ve all got the same appetites, the same little weaknesses and naughty ways.” And on he ran, as if in deliberate contrast to my extreme alertness.

  She had ordered up more trays. The counter was covered with sumptuous paste tiaras, bracelets and rings. Selecting a threestring necklace of imitation rubies, she held it to her throat, then took up a hand mirror to admire herself.

  And was it my imagination? It was not! She was using the mirror to observe the monkey and ourselves! First one dark eye, then the other fixed upon us; then the two of them together, warning us, imploring us, before she set the mirror down again and turned her back to us, and swept as if in anger along the edge of the glass counter, where a fresh display awaited her.

  At the same moment, the monkey took a step forward and I saw his hand rise to the opening of his overcoat. Throwing caution aside, I too stepped forward, my right arm drawn back, the fingers of my right hand flexed, palm parallel to the ground in the approved Sarratt manner. I had decided on an elbow to the heart, followed by a side-of-hand to the upper lip, to the point where the nose cartilage joins the top half of the jaw. A complicated network of nerves has its meeting point here, and a wellaimed blow can immobilise the victim for some while. The monkey was opening his mouth and breathing in. I anticipated a cry to Allah, or perhaps the screamed slogan of some fundamentalist sect—though I am no longer sure how much we knew or cared in those day about fundamentalist Arabs. I at once determined to scream myself, not only in order to confuse him, but because a deep breath would put more oxygen into my bloodstream and so increase my striking power. I was actually drawing this breath when I felt Monty’s hand lock like an iron ring round my wrist and, with unpredicted power, immobilise me as he drew me back to him.