The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  You must understand and try to pardon my callow susceptibility in those days to all forms of Nordic abstraction. What Ben was driven by, I pursued. The mythic island—it should have been Ossian’s!—the swirling clouds and tossing sea, the priestess in her solitary castle—I could not get enough of them. I was in the middle of my Romantic period, and my soul was lost to Stefanie before I met her.

  The dower house was on the other side of the island, they told me at the shop, better ask young Fergus to take you in his jeep. Young Fergus turned out to be seventy, if a day. We passed between a pair of crumbling iron gates. I paid off young Fergus and rang the bell. The door opened; a fair woman stared at me.

  She was tall and slim. If it was really true that she was my own age—and it was—she had an authority it would take me another lifetime to acquire. She wore, instead of white, a paint-smeared smock of dark blue. She held a palette knife in one hand, and as I spoke she raised it to her forehead and pushed away a stray bit of hair with the back of her wrist. Then lowered it again to her side, and stood listening to me long after I had finished speaking, while she pondered the resonance of my words inside her head and compared them with the man or boy who stood before her. But the strangest part of this moment is also the hardest for me to relate. It is that Stefanie came closer to the figure of my imagination than made sense. Her pallor, her air of uncorrupted truthfulness, of inner strength, coupled with an almost pitiable fragility, corresponded so exactly with my expectation that, had I bumped into her in another place, I would have known that she was Stefanie.

  “My name’s Ned,” I said, speaking to her eyes. “I’m a friend of Ben’s. Also a colleague. I’m alone. No one knows I’m here.”

  I had meant to go on. I had a pompous speech in my head that said something like “Please tell him that whatever he’s done, it makes no difference to me.” But the steadiness of her gaze prevented me.

  “Why should it matter who knows that you are here and who does not?” she asked. She spoke without accent, but with a German cadence, making tiny hesitations before the open vowels. “He is not hiding. Who is looking for him except you? Why should he hide?”

  “I understood he might be in some kind of trouble,” I said, following her into the house.

  The hall was half studio, half makeshift living room. Dust sheets covered much of the furniture. The remains of a meal lay on the table: two mugs, two plates, both used.

  “What kind of trouble?” she demanded.

  “It’s to do with his work in Berlin. I thought perhaps he would have told you about it.”

  “He has told me nothing. He has never talked to me about his work. Perhaps he knows I am not interested.”

  “May I ask what he does talk about?”

  She considered this. “No.” And then, as if relenting, “At present he does not talk to me at all. He seems to have become a Trappist. Why not? Sometimes he watches me paint, sometimes he fishes, sometimes we eat something or drink a little wine. Quite often he sleeps.”

  “How long’s he been here?”

  She shrugged “Three days?”

  “Did he come straight from Berlin?”

  “He came on the boat. Since he does not speak, that’s all I know.”

  “He disappeared,” I said. “There’s a hue and cry for him. They thought he might come to me. I don’t think they know about you.”

  She was listening to me again, listening first to my words and then my silence. She seemed to be without embarrassment, like a listening animal. It’s the authority of suffering, I thought, remembering her lover’s suicide, she cannot be reached by small worries.

  “They,” she repeated with puzzlement “Who are they? What is there to know about me that is so particular?”

  “Ben was doing secret work,” I said.

  “Ben?”

  “Like his father,” I said. “He was tremendously proud of following in his father’s steps.”

  She was shocked and agitated. “What? Who for? Secret work? What a fool!”

  “For British Intelligence. He was in Berlin, attached to the Military Adviser’s office, but his real work was intelligence.”

  “Ben?” she said as the disgust and disbelief gathered in her face. “All those lies he must tell? Ben?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. But it was duty.”

  “How terrible.”

  Her easel stood with its back to me. Placing herself the other side of it, she began mixing her paints.

  “If I could just talk to him,” I said, but she pretended to be too much lost to her painting to hear me.

  The back of the house gave on to parkland, then a line of pines hunchbacked by the wind. Beyond the pines lay a loch surrounded by small mauve hills. On its far bank I made out a fisherman standing on a collapsed jetty. He was fishing but not casting. I don’t know how long I watched him, but long enough to know that it was Ben, and that he had no interest in catching fish. I pushed open the French windows and stepped into the garden. A cold wind was ruffling the surface of the loch as I tiptoed along the jetty. He was wearing a tweed jacket that was too full for him. I guessed it had belonged to her dead lover. And a hat, a green felt hat that, like all hats with Ben, looked as though it had been made for him. He didn’t turn, though he must have felt my footsteps. I placed myself beside him.

  “The only thing you’ll catch like that is pneumonia, you German ass,” I said.

  His face was turned against me, so I remained standing beside him, watching the water with him and sensing the nudge of his shoulder as the rocking jetty threw us carelessly together. I watched the water thicken and the sky turn grey behind the mountains. A few times I watched the red float of his line vanish below the oily surface. But if a fish had struck Ben made no effort to play it or reel it in. I saw the lights go on in the house, and the figure of Stefanie standing at her easel, adding a brush stroke, then backing her wrist against her brow. The air turned cold and the night gathered, but Ben didn’t move. We were in competition with each other, as we had been during our strongarm training. I was demanding, Ben was refusing. Only one of us could have his way. If it took me all night and all tomorrow, and if I starved in the process, I wasn’t going to yield till he’d acknowledged me.

  A half moon came up, and stars. The wind dropped and silver ground mist formed across the blackened heather. And still we stood there, waiting for one of us to surrender. I was nearly sleeping on my feet when I heard the rattle of his reel and saw the float lift from the water and the bare line after it, flashing in the moonlight. I didn’t move and didn’t speak. I let him reel in and make his hook fast. I let him turn to me, because he had to if he wanted to walk past me down the jetty.

  We stood face to face in the moonlight. Ben looked downwards, apparently studying my feet to see how he could step round them. His gaze travelled up to my face, but nothing changed in his expression. His locked features stayed locked. If they betrayed anything, it was anger.

  “Well,” he said. “Enter the third murderer.”

  This time neither of us laughed.

  She must have sensed our approach and removed herself. I heard music playing in another part of the house. When we reached the hall, Ben headed for the stairs but I grabbed his arm.

  “You’ve got to tell me,” I said. “There’s never going to be anyone better to tell. I broke ranks to come here. You’ve got to tell me what happened to the network.”

  There was a long drawing room beyond the hall, with shuttered windows and more dustsheets over the sofas. It was cold, but Ben still had his jacket on and I my greatcoat. I opened the shutters and let the moonlight in. I had an instinct that anything brighter would disturb him. The music was not far away from us. I thought it was Grieg. I wasn’t sure. Ben spoke without remorse and without catharsis. He had confessed enough to himself, all day and night, I knew. He talked in the dead tone of somebody describing a disaster he knows that nobody can understand who was not part of it, and the music kept playing below his voice. He
had no use for himself. The glamorous hero had given up as one of life’s contenders. Perhaps he was a little tired of his guilt. He spoke tersely. I think he wanted me to go.

  “Haggarty’s a shit,” he said. “World class. He’s a thief, he drinks, he rapes a bit. His one justification was the Seidl network. Head Office were trying to wheedle him away from it and give Seidl to new people. I was the first new person. Haggarty decided to punish me for taking away his network.”

  He described the studied insults, the successive night duties and weekends, the hostile reports passed back to Haggarty’s supporters’ club in Head Office.

  “At first he wouldn’t tell me anything about the network. Then Head Office bawled him out, so he told me everything. Fifteen years of it. Every tiny detail of their lives, even the joes who’d died on the job. He’d send files to me in pyramids, all flagged and crossreferred. Read this, remember that. Who’s she? Who’s he? Note this address, the name, these covernames, those symbols. Escape procedures. Fallbacks. The recognition codes and safety procedures for the radio. Then he’d test me. Take me to the safe room, sit me across the table, grill me. ‘You’re not up to it. We can’t send you in till you know your stuff. You’d better stay in over the weekend and mug it up. I’ll test you again on Monday.’ The network was his life. He wanted me to feel inadequate. I did and I was.”

  But Head Office did not give in to Haggarty’s bullying, neither did Ben. “I put myself on an exam footing,” he said.

  As the day of his first meeting with Seidl approached, Ben assembled for himself a system of mnemonics and acronyms that would enable him to encompass the network’s fifteen years of history. Seated night and day in his office at Station Headquarters, he drew up consciousness charts and communications charts and devised systems for memorizing the aliases, covernames, home addresses and places of employment of its agents, sub-agents, couriers and collaborators. Then he transferred his data to plain postcards, writing on one side only. On the other, in one line, he wrote the subject “dead-letter boxes,” “salaries,” “safe houses.” Each night, before going back to his flat or stretching out in the Station sick room, he would play a game of memory with himself, first putting the cards face downward on his desk, then comparing what he had remembered with the data on the reverse side.

  “I didn’t sleep a lot but that’s not unusual,” he said. “As the day came up, I didn’t sleep at all. I spent the whole night mugging up my stuff, then I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. When I got up I couldn’t remember any of it. Sort of paralysis. I went to my room, sat down at the desk, put my head in my hands and started to ask myself questions. “If covername Margaret-stroke-two thinks he’s under surveillance, whom does he contact how, and what does the contact then do?” The answer was a total blank.

  “Haggarty wandered in and asked how I was feeling and I said ‘fine.’ To do him justice, he wished me luck and I think he meant it. I thought he’d shoot some trick question at me and I was going to tell him to go to hell. But he just said, ‘Komm gut heim,’ and patted my shoulder. I put the cards in my pocket. Don’t ask me why. I was scared of failure. That’s why we do everything, isn’t it? I was scared of failure and I hated Haggarty and Haggarty had put me to the torture. I’ve got about two hundred other reasons why I took the cards, but none of them help a great deal. Perhaps it was my way of committing suicide. I quite like that idea. I took them and I went across. We used a limousine, specially converted. I sat in the back with my double hidden under the seat. The Vopos weren’t allowed to search us, of course. All the same, switching with a double as you turn a sharp corner is a bloody hairy game. You’ve got to sort of roll out of the car. Seidl had provided a bike for me. He believes in bicycles. His guards used to lend him one when he was a prisoner of war in England.”

  Smiley had told me the story already, but I let Ben tell it to me again.

  “I had the cards in my jacket pocket,” he went on. “My inside jacket pocket. It was one of those blazing-hot Berlin days. I think I unbuttoned my jacket while I bicycled. I don’t know. When I try to remember, I sometimes unbuttoned it and I sometimes didn’t. That’s what happens to your memory when you work it to death. It does all the versions for you. I got to the rendezvous early, checked the cars, the usual bullshit, went in. It had all come back to me by then. Taking the cards with me had done the trick. I didn’t need them. Seidl was fine. I was fine. We did our business, I briefed him, gave him some money—all just like Sarratt. I rode back to the pickup point, ditched the bike, dived into the car and as we crossed into West Berlin I realised I hadn’t got the cards. I was missing the weight of them, or the pressure or something. I was in a panic but I always am. Deep down, I’m in a panic all the time. That’s who I am. This was just a bigger panic. I made them drop me at my flat, rang Seidl’s emergency number. No one answered. I tried the fallback. No answer. I tried his stand-in, a woman called Lotte. No answer. I took a cab to Tempelhof, made a discreet exit, came here.”

  Suddenly there was only Stefanie’s music to listen to. Ben had finished his story. I didn’t realise at first that this was all there was. I waited, staring at him, expecting him to go on. I had been wanting a kidnapping at least—savage East German secret police rising from the back of his car, sandbagging him, forcing a chloroformed mask on him while they rifled his pockets. It was only gradually that the appalling banality of what he had told me got through to me: that you could lose a network as easily as you could lose a bunch of keys or a cheque book or a pocket handkerchief. I was craving for a greater dignity, but he had none to offer me.

  “So where did you last have them?” I said stupidly. I could have been talking to a child about his lost schoolbooks, but he didn’t mind, he had no pride any more.

  “The cards?” he said. “Maybe on the bicycle. Maybe rolling out of the car. Maybe getting back into it. The bike has a security chain to lock round the wheel. I had to stoop down to put it on and take it off. Maybe then. It’s like losing anything. Till you find it, you never know. Afterwards, it’s obvious. But there hasn’t been an afterwards.”

  “Do you think you were followed?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  I wanted to ask him when he had written his love letter to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Besides, I thought I knew it was in one of his drinking sessions when Haggarty was riding him hardest and he was in despair. What I really wanted him to tell me was that he had never written it. I wanted to put the clock back and make things the way they had been until a week ago. But the simple questions had died with the simple answers. Our childhoods were over for good.

  They must have surrounded the house, and certainly they never rang the bell. Monty was probably standing outside the window when I opened the shutters to let the moonlight in, because when he needed to, he just stepped into the room, looking embarrassed but resolute.

  “You did ever so nice, Ned,” he said consolingly. “It was the public library gave you away. Your nice librarian lady took a real shine to you. I think she’d have come with us if we’d let her.”

  Skordeno followed him, and then Smiley appeared in the other doorway, wearing the apologetic air that frequently accompanied his most ruthless acts. And I recognised with no particular surprise that I had done everything he had wanted me to do. I had put myself in Ben’s position and led them to my friend. Ben didn’t seem particularly surprised either. Perhaps he was relieved. Monty and Skordeno moved into place either side of him, but Ben remained sitting among the dustsheets, his tweed jacket pulled around him like a rug. Skordeno tapped him on the shoulder; then Monty and Skordeno stooped and, like a pair of furniture removers used to one another’s timing, lifted him gently to his feet. When I protested to Ben that I had not knowingly betrayed him, he shook his head to say it didn’t matter. Smiley stepped aside to let them by. His myopic gaze was fixed on me enquiringly.

  “We’ve arranged a special sailing,” he said.

  “I’m not coming,” I
replied.

  I looked away from him and when I looked again he was gone. I heard the jeep disappearing down the track. I followed the music across the empty hall into a study crammed with books and magazines and what appeared to be the manuscript of a novel spread over the floor. She was sitting sideways in a deep chair. She had changed into a housecoat and her pale golden hair hung loose over her shoulders. She was barefoot, and did not lift her head as I entered. She spoke to me as if she had known me all her life, and I suppose in a way she had, in the sense that I was Ben’s familiar. She switched off the music.

  “Were you his lover?” she asked.

  “No. He wanted me to be. I realise that now.”

  She smiled. “And I wanted him to be my lover, but that wasn’t possible either, was it?” she said.

  “It seems not.”

  “Have you had women, Ned?”

  “No.”

  “Had Ben?”

  “I don’t know. I think he tried. I suppose it didn’t work.”

  She was breathing deeply and tears were trickling down her cheeks and neck. She climbed to her feet, eyes pressed shut, and, like a blind woman, stretched out her arms for me to embrace her. Her body squeezed against me as she buried her head in my shoulder and shook and wept. I put my arms round her but she pushed me away and led me to the sofa.

  “Who made him become one of you?” she said.

  “No one. It was his own choice. He wanted to imitate his father.”