The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  A thick accent, presumably Hungarian: “Hullo? Yes? Who is it?”

  I nodded to Latzi to go ahead.

  “Good evening, sir. I wish, please to speak to Mr. Peter.” “What about?”

  “Is this Mr. Peter, please? It is a private matter.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Is this Peter?”

  “My name is Peter!”

  “It is regarding Susi, Mr. Peter,” Latzi explained, with sideways wink at me. “Susi will not be coming home tonight, Mr. Peter. She will be staying with friends, I am afraid. Good friends. She will be looked after. Good night, Mr. Peter.”

  He was about to replace the receiver, but I stayed his hand long enough to hear a growl of contempt or incomprehension the other end before he rang off.

  Latzi smiled at me, very pleased with himself. “He plays it well, Herr Doktor. A true professional, I would say. A fine actor, you agree?”

  “Did you recognise the voice?”

  “No, Herr Doktor. Alas, the voice is not familiar to me.”

  I shoved open the study door. The Professor sat at his desk, his fists in front of him. Helena sat on the tutorial sofa. I felt a need to acquaint the Professor with my scepticism. I stepped into the room, closing the door behind me.

  “The man Latzi, as you call him, is a criminal,” I said. “Either he’s some kind of confidence trickster, or he’s a self-confessed murderer who came to Germany on false papers in order to kill you and your wife. Either way, you’re within your rights to turn him over to the West German police and be done with him. Do you want to do that? Or do you want to leave the decisions to us? Which?”

  To my surprise, he appeared for the first time that evening genuinely alarmed. Perhaps he had not expected to be challenged. Perhaps the proximity of his own death had dawned on him. Either way, I had the impression he was attaching more importance to my question than I understood. Helena had turned her eyes away from me and was watching him also. Critically. A woman waiting to be paid.

  “Do whatever you must do,” he muttered.

  “Then you must do as I ask. Both of you.”

  “We are cooperative. We shall be—yes, cooperative. We have been—cooperative—for many years. Too many.”

  I glanced at Helena.

  “It will be my husband’s responsibility,” she said.

  I had no time to ponder the mysteries of this ominous statement. “Then please put together some night things and be ready at the garden door in five minutes,” I said, and returned to the drawing room and Latzi.

  I think he had been standing at the door for he stepped quickly back as I entered, then clasped his hands to his chin and beamed at me, asking what was gefällig—what was my pleasure?

  “Have you ever seen the Professor before tonight?”

  “No, sir. Only photographs. One would admire him anywhere.

  A true aristocrat.”

  “And his wife?”

  “She is known to me, sir. Naturally.”

  “How?”

  “She was once an actress, Herr Doktor, one of the best in Budapest.”

  “And you saw her on the stage?”

  Another pause. “No, sir.”

  “Then where did you see her?”

  He was trying to read me. I had the impression he was wondering whether she might have told me something, and he was trimming his answers accordingly.

  “Theatre bills, Your Excellency. When she was young, her famous face was on every street corner. All young men loved her— I was no exception.”

  “Where else?”

  He saw that I had nothing. And I saw that he saw. “So sad about a woman’s looks, Herr Doktor. A man, he can remain impressive until he is eighty. A woman—” he sighed.

  I let him pack together his weapons, then took possession of them. I loaded the soft-nosed bullets into the revolver. As I did so, a thought occurred to me.

  “When I walked in here, the cylinder was empty and the bullets were spread on the table.”

  “Correct, Excellency.”

  “When did you take the bullets out of the cylinder?” I asked. “Before entering the house. So that I could demonstrate my peaceful intentions. Naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  As we moved to the hall, I shoved the revolver into my waist-band.

  “If you take it into your head to run away, I shall shoot you in the back,” I explained to him, and had the satisfaction of seeing his little eyes swivel in alarm. Professional assassins, it seemed, did not take kindly to their own medicine.

  I tossed him his raincoat and glanced round the room for other traces of him. There were none. I ordered silence and led the three of them into the garden and along the tow-path to my car. A famous actress, I thought, and not a word about it on the file. I put the Professor and Helena in the back, and Latzi in the front beside me. Then we sat still for five minutes while I waited for the slightest sign that we were being watched. Nothing. It was by now midnight and a new moon had risen among the stars. I circled the town, keeping a watch on my mirror, then took the autobahn south-west to the Starnbergersee, where we kept a safe house for briefing and debriefing joes in passage. It lay close to the lake’s edge and was manned by two murderous long-haired wonders left over from London Station’s Lamplighters Section. They were called Jeffrey and Arnold. Arnold was hovering in the doorway by the time we reached it. One hand was in the pocket of his kaftan. The other hung threateningly to his side.

  “It’s me, you buffoon,” I said softly.

  Jeffrey showed the Professor and his wife to their bedroom while Arnold sat with Latzi in the drawing room. I went down the garden to the boat-house, where I was at last able to talk to Toby Esterhase on the safe telephone. He was amazingly composed. It was as if he had been expecting my call.

  Toby arrived in Munich on the first flight from London next morning, wearing a beaver-lamb coat and a leather Trilby hat, and looking more the impresario than the beleaguered spy.

  “Nedike, my God!” he cried, embracing me like a prodigal father. “Listen, you look fantastic, I would say. Congratulations, okay? Nothing like a little excitement to bring the blooms to your cheeks. How’s Mabel, actually? A marriage, that’s something you got to water, same as a flower.”

  I drove slowly and spoke, as best I could, dispassionately, giving him the fruits of my researches throughout the long night. I wanted him to know everything I knew by the time we reached the lake house.

  Neither the Americans nor the West Germans had any trace of Latzi, I said. Neither, I gathered from Toby, had London.

  “Latzi, that’s an unwritten page, Ned. Totally,” Toby agreed, surveying the passing landscape with every sign of approval.

  There was also no trace of his Bavarian covername, or of any of the covernames that Latzi claimed to have used on his “duties” inside Hungary, I said.

  Toby lowered his window to enjoy the fragrance of the fields.

  Latzi’s West German passport was a fake, I continued with determination, one of a batch recently run up by a low-grade forger in Vienna and sold on the private market.

  Toby was mildly indignant. “I mean who buys that crap, for God’s sake?” he protested, as we passed a pair of palomino horses grazing in a paddock. With passports, these days, you get what you pay for actually. What you get for crap like that, it’s six months in a stinking gaol.” And he shook his head sadly like a man whose warnings go unheeded until it’s to late.

  I blundered on. The phone number in Bonn belonged to the Hungarian military attaché, I said, whose first name was indeed listed as Peter. He was an identified Hungarian Intelligence officer. I allowed myself a restrained irony:

  “That’s a new one for us, isn’t it, Toby? A spy using his own name as a covername? I mean why bother any more? You’re Toby, so we’ll keep it a secret and call you Toby instead. Great.”

  But Toby was too set on enjoying his day in Bavaria to be disturbed by the implications of my words. “Nedike, believe
me, those army guys, they’re total idiots. Hungarian military intelligence, that’s the same as Hungarian military music, know what I mean? They blow it out their arses actually.”

  I continued my recitation. West German Security had a permanent tap running on the Hungarian attaché’s telephone, I said. A cassette of Latzi’s conversation with Peter was on its way to my office. From what I understood, it offered no surprises except to underline that Peter appeared genuinely unprepared for the call. Peter had neither made nor received further calls last night, I said, nor had there been any burst of diplomatic signals traffic from the roof of the Hungarian Embassy in Bonn. Peter had, however, complained to the Protocol Department of the West German Foreign Office about telephone harassment on his home line. This was not, I suggested, the act of a conspirator. Toby was less sure.

  “Could be one thing, Ned, could be the other,” he said, leaning back in his seat and languidly tilting the flat of his hand both ways. “A man thinks he’s been compromised? So maybe it’s not so stupid he makes a formal complaint once, brushes over his traces—why not?”

  I gave him the rest. I was determined to. Latzi’s description of the putative diplomat in Vienna tallied with that of one Leo Bakocs, Commercial Secretary and, like Peter, an identified Hungarian Intelligence officer, I said. Cousin Wagner was getting hold of a photograph for us to show to Latzi later in the day.

  The name Bakocs brought a fond smile to Toby’s lips. “They drag Leo in on this? Listen, Leo’s so vain he spies only on duchesses.” He laughed in jolly disbelief. “Leo in some lousy hotel, handing over garottes to a smelly assassin? Tell me another, Ned. I mean.”

  “It isn’t me who’s telling you,” I said. “It’s Latzi.”

  Lastly, I said, I had despatched Jeffrey to the Munich whorehouse to pay Latzi’s bill and collect his overnight bag. The only article of interest in his luggage was a set of pornographic photographs.

  “It’s the tension, Ned,” Toby explained magnanimously. “In a foreign country, killing somebody you don’t know, you need a little private company—know what I mean?”

  In return, Toby had brought me nothing whatever, private or otherwise. I had imagined him on the phone all night, and perhaps he had been. But not in support of my enquiries.

  “Maybe we have a party tonight,” he proposed. “Harry Palfrey of Legal Department is coming over with a couple of guys from the Foreign Office. That’s a nice fellow, Harry. Very English.”

  I was bewildered. “What branch of the Foreign Office?” I said. “Who? Why Palfrey?”

  But as Toby would say, questions are never dangerous until you answer them. We arrived at the lake house to find Arnold cooking eggs and bacon. The Professor and Latzi sat at one end of the table. Helena, a vegetarian, sat at the other, eating a nut bar from her handbag.

  Arnold was blond and lank. His hair was done in a knot at the back. “They had a bit of a dingdong, Ned,” he confided to me disapprovingly while Toby fell about the Professor’s neck. “The Professor and his missus, a real dogfight. I don’t know who started it or what it was about, I wouldn’t ask.”

  “Did Latzi join in?”

  “He was going to, Ned, but I told him to keep quiet. I don’t like a man who comes between husband and wife, I never did.”

  In retrospect, our discussions that day resemble an intricate minuet, beginning in our humble kitchen and ending in the courts of the Almighty Himself—more precisely in the beflagged conference room of the American Consulate General, where the inspiring features of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew smiled favourably on our endeavours.

  For Toby, as I soon realised, far from doing nothing, had laid on an entire programme for himself, which he advanced from stage to stage with the dexterity of a ringmaster. In the kitchen, he listened to the whole story over again from Latzi and the Professor, while Helena chewed her nut bar. I had never seen Toby in full Hungarian flight before and found time to marvel at the transformation. With one sentence he had flung aside the unnatural corset of his Anglo-Saxon restraint and was back among his people. His eyes caught fire. He preened, and his back arched as if he were sitting on a parade horse.

  “Ned, they say you have been quite fantastic actually,” he called to me down the table in the midst of all this. “A tower of strength, they are saying, completely. I think maybe they will recommend you a Nobel prize!”

  “Tell them to make it an Oscar, I’ll accept,” I said sourly, and took myself for a walk down to the lakeside to recover my temper.

  I returned to the house to find Toby and the Professor closeted in the drawing room, talking volubly. Toby’s high respect for the Professor seemed, if anything, to have increased. Latzi was helping Arnold with the washing-up and they were both sniggering. Latzi had evidently been telling a dirty joke. Helena was nowhere to be seen. Next, it was Latzi’s turn to sit alone with Toby, while the Professor and his wife walked uneasily at the lakeside, pausing every few steps to remonstrate with each other, until the Professor turned on his heel and strode back to the house.

  Seizing the moment, I slipped out and joined Helena. Her lips were pursed and her face was sickly-white—whether from fear, anger or fatigue, I couldn’t tell. When she spoke, she had to stop and begin again before the words would come.

  “He is a liar,” she said. “It is all lies! Lie, lie! He is a liar!”

  “Who is?”

  “They are both liars. From the day of birth, they lie. On their deathbeds, they lie.”

  “So what’s the truth?” I said.

  “Wait is the truth!”

  “Wait for what?”

  “I have warned him. ‘If you do this, I shall tell the English.’ So we wait. If he does it, I shall tell you. If he repents, I shall spare him. I am his wife.”

  She walked to the house, a stately woman. As she entered it, a black limousine pulled up in the drive and Harry Palfrey, the Circus legal adviser, emerged, accompanied by two other members of the English governing classes. I recognised the taller of them as Alan Barnaby, luminary of the Foreign Office’s misnomered Information and Research Department, which traded in Communist counterpropaganda at its sleaziest. Toby was shaking him warmly by the hand while with his other he beckoned me to join them. We went indoors and sat down.

  At first I smouldered in silence. The players had been sent upstairs. Toby was doing the talking, the others listened to him with the special reverence their kind reserves for paupers or black men. I even found myself feeling a little protective of him—of Toby Esterhase, God help me, who protected no one but himself!

  “What we are dealing with here, Alan, without talking out of turn actually, is a completely top source who is now expended,” Toby explained. “A great joe, but his day is over.”

  “You mean the Prof,” Barnaby said helpfully.

  “They are on to him. They know his value too well. From certain clues I have obtained from Latzi, it’s clear the Hungarians have a fat dossier on the Professor’s operations. After all, I mean, why would they try to kill a fellow who is no use to us? A Hungarian assassination attempt—that’s a Good Housekeeping certificate for the target, I would say.”

  “We can’t be responsible for the Professor’s safety indefinitely,” Palfrey cautioned us with his loser’s smile. “We can give him protection for a bit, naturally. But we can’t accept a life interest in him. He has to know that. We may have to get him to sign something just to make the point.”

  The second Foreign Office man was round and shiny with a chain across his waistcoat. I had a childish urge to pull it and see if he squealed.

  “Well, I think we may all be talking too much,” he said silkily. “If the Americans agree to take the pair of ’em off our hands, the Prof and his missus, we shan’t have to worry, shall we? Best keep our heads down and our powder dry, what?”

  Palfrey demurred. “He should still sign a release for us, Norman. He has rather been playing us off against the Cousins in the last few years.”

  Eve
r the protector of his own, Toby gave a knowing smile. “All the best joes do this, I would say, Harry. One hand washes the other, even at Teodor’s level. The question is, now that he is no longer usable, what have we got to lose except trouble actually? I mean, I am not the expert here,” he added, with an ingratiating smile at Barnaby.

  “What about the assassin fellow?” said the man called Norman. “Will he play ball as well? Bloody dangerous, isn’t it, sitting up there like a duck in a tree?”

  “Latzi is flexible,” said Toby. “He is scared, he is also a complete patriot.” I would not have backed him on either of these points, but I was too sickened to interrupt. “These apparatchiks, when they step out of the system, they are in shock. Latzi is coping with it. He agonises over his family, but he is reconciled. If Teodor accepts, Latzi will accept also. With guarantees, naturally.”

  “What sort of guarantees?” said the shiny Foreign Office man, so quickly that not even Harry Palfrey got in ahead of him.

  Toby did not falter. “Well, naturally the usual. Latzi and Teodor don’t want to be thrown on to the rubbish heap when this one’s over, I would say. Nor does Helena. American passports, a good bit of money at the end of the road, assistance and protection— I mean, that’s basic so to speak.”

  “The whole thing’s a con,” I blurted. I had had enough.

  Everybody was smiling at me. They would have smiled whatever I had said. They were that sort of crowd. If I had said I was a Hungarian double agent, they would have smiled. If I had said I was Adolf Hitler’s reincarnated younger brother, they would have smiled. All but Toby, that is, whose face had acquired the lifelessness of someone who knows that all he can safely be at this moment is nobody at all.

  “Now why on earth do you say that, Ned?” Barnaby was asking, awfully interested.

  “Latzi’s not a trained killer,” I said. “I don’t know what he is, but he isn’t a killer. He was carrying an unloaded gun. No professional in his right mind does that. He’s posing as a Bavarian artist, but he’s wearing Hungarian clothes and half the junk in his pockets is Hungarian. I was standing over him when he made his phone call to Bonn. Fine, the attaché’s first name is Peter. It’s in the diplomatic list as Peter. Peter wasn’t expecting that call in a month of Sundays. Latzi laid it on him. Listen to the German tape of their conversation.”