The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  I lifted the receiver and when I heard a woman’s voice I quickened, not only because of my domestic ambiguities but because my errand was to trace a German woman—the same Britta who had been taking lesson’s in terror in the Shuf Mountains.

  But it was not Britta. It was not Monica and not Mabel. The voice was middle-American and scared. And I was Peter, remember— Peter Carter, from a great British newspaper, even if its local correspondent had never heard of me. I was reminding myself of this as I listened to her.

  “Peter, for Christ’s sake, I need to be with you,” she said in a single rush of breath. “Peter, where the fuck have you been?”

  A rattle of heavy machine-gun fire broke out, to be promptly silenced by the smack of a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the phone resumed in greater agitation.

  “Jesus, Peter, why don’t you call me? Okay, I said some shitty things. I spoiled your copy. I’m sorry. I mean, Jesus, what are we? Children? You know how I hate this stuff.”

  A frenzy of rifle fire. Sometimes the kids just shot into the sky for effect.

  Her voice rose steeply. “Talk to me, Peter! Tell me something funny, will you, please? Something funny must be happening somewhere in the world! Peter, will you please answer me? You’re not dead, are you? You’re not lying on the floor with your head blown off? Just nod for no. I don’t want to die alone, Peter. I’m sociable. I love sociably, I die sociably. Peter, answer me. Please.”

  “What room are you calling?” I said.

  Dead silence. The really dead silence that gathers between bursts of gunfire.

  “Who is this?” she demanded.

  “This is Peter, but I don’t think I’m your Peter. What room are you calling?”

  “This room.”

  “What number?”

  “Room 607.”

  “I’m afraid he must have checked out. I arrived in Beirut this afternoon. This is the room they gave me.”

  A grenade exploded, answered by another. Out in the street, perhaps three blocks away, somebody screamed seriously. The scream ended.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Could have been a woman,” she said.

  “Could have been,” I agreed.

  “Who are you? You British?”

  “Yes.” Peter is too, I thought, without knowing why.

  “What do you do?”

  “For a living?”

  “Just talk to me. Keep talking.”

  “I’m a journalist,” I said.

  “Like Peter?”

  “I don’t know what kind of journalist he is.”

  “He’s tough. The danger school. Are you tough?”

  “Some things scare me, some don’t.”

  “Mice?”

  “Mice scare me stiff.”

  “Are you good?”

  “As good as the news, I suppose. I don’t write much any more. I’m editorial these days.”

  “Married?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “To Peter?”

  “No, not Peter.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “My husband?”

  “No. Peter,” I said. I did not ask myself why I was more interested in her adultery than her marriage.

  “You don’t time things like that out here,” she said. “A year, a couple of years—you don’t talk that way. Not in Beirut. You’re married too, aren’t you? You didn’t want to tell me till I told you first.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “So tell me about her.”

  “My wife?”

  “Sure. Do you love her? Is she tall? Great skin? Very British, stiff upper lip?”

  I told her some harmless things about Mabel and invented some others, hating myself.

  “I mean, who on earth can believe in sex after fifteen years of the same person?” she said.

  I laughed but didn’t answer.

  “Are you faithful to her, Peter?”

  “Infallibly,” I said, after a delay.

  “Okay, let’s do work. Go back to work. What are you doing out here? Something special? Tell me what you’re doing.”

  The spy in me dodged the question: “I think its time you told me what you do,” I said. “Are you a journalist too?”

  A stream of tracer tore into the sky. The firing followed.

  Her voice turned weary, as if the fear had worn her out. “I file copy, sure.”

  “Who for?”

  “A lousy wire service, what else? Fifty cents a line, till some big prick steals it and makes two grand in an afternoon. What’s new?” “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Annie. Call me Annie. Listen, you’re real nice, know that? What do you do if a Doberman humps your leg?” “Bark?”

  “Fake an orgasm. I’m scared, Peter. Maybe I didn’t make that clear. I need a drink.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Right here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “In the hotel, for Christ’s sake. The Commodore. Standing in the lobby, smelling Ahmed’s garlic and getting eyeballed by the Greek.”

  “Who’s the Greek?”

  “Stavros. He pushes hard drugs and swears up and down they’re soft. He’s serious sleaze.”

  I listened, and for the first time made out the babble of voices in the background. The shooting was over.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Peter, put that light out.”

  She must have known there was only one light working in the room, a rickety bedside light with a tilted parchment shade. It lay on a locker between the two divans. I turned it off. There were stars again.

  “Unlock your door and leave it ajar. One inch. Got booze?”

  “A bottle of Scotch,” I said.

  “Vodka?”

  “No.”

  “Ice?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bring some. Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a good man. Anybody ever told you that?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “Watch this space,” she said, and rang off.

  She never came to me.

  You may imagine it any way you like, as I did, all ways, while I sat on the divan, watching the door in the darkness and watching my life go by while I waited to hear her tread in the corridor.

  After an hour I went downstairs. I sat in the bar and listened to every female American voice I could find. None fitted. I looked for someone who might call herself Annie and proposition a man she had only talked to on the telephone. I bribed Ahmed to tell me who had used the house phone from the lobby at nine o’clock that night, but his memory, for whatever reason, did not stretch to an emotional American woman.

  I went so far as to try to establish the identity of the previous occupant of my room, and whether his first name was Peter, but Ahmed became mysteriously vague and said he had been in Tripoli visiting his old mother, and the hotel kept no lists.

  Did the real Peter return in the nick of time and sweep her off? Did Stavros the Greek? Was she a whore? Was I? Was Ahmed pimping her? Was the phone call some kind of elaborate trick she played on newcomers to the hotel, to hook them on their first nervous night alone?

  Or was she, as I prefer to think, simply a frightened woman missing her boyfriend and craving a body to hold on to when the nightly thunder of the city started driving her mad?

  Whatever mystery she presented, I had learned something about myself even if it disconcerted me. I had learned how perilous was my solitude, how available I was, how much I needed to give love and receive it; and how fickle in me was that virtue which the Service called “personal security,” compared with my growing hunger for connection. I thought of Monica and my hollow protestations of love which so failed to move the gods they were addressed to. I thought of Giles Latimer and his hopeless passion. And somehow the woman who called herself Annie seemed to belong to the s
ame line of anguished messengers, all speaking from inside myself.

  After the faceless girl came the faceless boy. That happened the next evening.

  Exhausted, I had settled myself in the hotel lobby and I was drinking my Scotch alone. I had been visiting the camps round Sidon and my hand was still shaking from just another day in southern Lebanon. Now it was the magic hour of dusk when Beirut’s human animal kingdom agreed to put aside its feuds and assemble at the common watering hole. I have seen the same thing happen in the jungle. Perhaps you have too. At a single command, elephants, wart-hogs, gazelles, lions and giraffes tiptoe from the protective darkness of the trees and, mostly in silence, arrange themselves on the muddy flats. You could observe the Commodore lobby at the same hour, when the journalists came back from their day’s excursions. As the electric glass doors, always a little too slow on their feet, sighed and grunted from their exertions, so the dark of the early Beirut night disgorged its motley: a Swedish television unit, fronted by a grey-faced blonde in designer denims; a photographer and correspondent from an American weekly; the wire men always in pairs; an elderly and utterly mysterious East German with his Japanese mistress. All had the same self-consciously undramatic way of entering, and pausing, and setting down the day’s burden.

  Not that their day was over. For the real journalists, there were films to be despatched, stories to be written and telexed and telephoned. Someone was missing and must be accounted for. So-and-so had taken a bad bullet, did his wife know? Nevertheless, with the closing of the glass doors behind them, their day was won back from the enemy. The hackpack was battening down the hatches for the night.

  And as I watched, I waited—to meet a man who knew a man who knew another man who just might know the woman I had been sent to find. My day till then had yielded nothing, except another tour of the wretched of the earth.

  Elsewhere in the lobby, other species were gathering, less glamorous but frequently more interesting to the observer: carpetbaggers and arms dealers and drug-dealers and dark-suited minor diplomats, the pedlars in influence and information, switching at their worry-beads as their restless eyes darted from face to face about the room. And the spies—everyone’s spies—trading openly, because in Beirut their trade was everyone’s. There was not a man or woman in the place who had not got his source of inside information, if it was only Ahmed behind the counter, who for a few dollars and a smile would tell you the secrets of the universe.

  But the figure who had caught my eye was exotic even by the standards of the Commodore’s menagerie. I did not see him enter. He must have come in behind a group. I saw him inside the lobby, framed against the darkness of the glass doors, dressed in a striped football shirt and a clean white nurse’s scarf tied lightly round his head. If he had not been slender and flat-chested, I would not have been certain, at first sight, whether he was a woman pretending to be a man, or a man pretending to be a woman.

  The security man had noticed him too. So had Ahmed the concierge behind his formidable counter. His two Kalashnikovs were propped against the wall behind him, just below the pigeonholes where the room keys hung, and I saw Ahmed ease a half-step backward so that he had one within reach. A small hand-grenade in that lobby at that hour could have wiped out half the better rackets in the city.

  But the apparition kept moving forward, either unaware or unheeding of the curiosity he was arousing. He was tall and young and agile, but rigid. He was like a person without will, summoned forward by his controller’s voice. I saw him better now. He had dark glasses, black stubble and moustache. That was why his face had seemed so black. And the white nurse’s scarf over his head. But it was the automaton’s stiffness of his walk that set my skin tingling and made me wonder what kind of believer we might have on our hands.

  He had reached the centre of the lobby. A few people made way for him. Some looked at him and looked away, others turned their backs in abstention, as if they knew and did not like him. Suddenly, under the brightness of the centre light, he seemed to be ascending. With his shrouded head forward and his arms barely moving, he was mounting his own scaffold on orders from above. I saw now that he was American. I saw it in the dipping knees and hanging wrists and slightly girlish hips. An all-American boy. His dark glasses were not dark enough, apparently, for a cloth eye-shade dangled from one long hand. It was of the kind that gamblers are supposed to wear, and night editors in forties films. He was six feet tall, at least. He wore sneakers, vestal white like his headscarf, and soundless.

  An Arab freak? I wondered.

  A crazed Zionist! There had been a few of those. Stoned?

  A high-school war tourist on the hippy trail, searching for kicks in the city of the damned?

  Changing direction, he had begun talking to the receptionist, but at an angle facing into the lobby, already searching for the person he was enquiring for. Which was when I saw the red spots spattered over his cheeks and forehead, like hives or chicken pox, but more vivid. The bedbugs had eaten him in some stinking hostel, I decided. He had stuck his head through the windscreen of a clapped-out car. He started walking towards me. Stiffly again, without expression. Purposefully, a man used to being looked at. Angrily, the eyeshade dangling from his hand. Glowering at me blindly through his black glasses as I sat drinking. A woman had taken his arm. She wore a skirt and could have been the nurse who had given him his headscarf. They stood before me. Me and no one else.

  “Sir? This is Sol, sir,” she said—or Mort, or Syd, or whatever. “He’s asking whether you’re the journalist, sir.”

  I said I was a journalist.

  “From London, sir, visiting? Are you the editor, sir? Are you influential, sir?”

  Influential, I doubted, I said with a deprecating smile. I was on the managerial side, here on a brief swing.

  “And going back to London, sir? Soon?”

  In Beirut you learn not to talk in advance about your movements. “Pretty soon,” I conceded, though the truth was I was planning to return south again next day.

  “Can Sol speak with you a moment, sir, just speak? Sol needs very much to speak with a person who has influence with the major Western newspapers. The journalists here, he feels they’ve seen it all, they’re jaded. Sol needs a voice from outside.”

  I made space and she sat beside me while Sol very slowly lowered himself into a chair—this covered, silent, very clean man in his long football sleeves and headscarf. Seated finally, he laid his wrists over his knees, holding the eyeshade in both hands. Then he gave a long sigh and began to murmur to me.

  “There’s this thing I’ve written, sir. I’d like, please, to have it printed in your newspaper.”

  His voice, though soft, was educated and polite. But it was lifeless and, like his movements, economical, as if each word hurt him to produce. Inside the lenses of his very dark glass I saw that his left eye was smaller than his right. Narrower. Not swollen, not closed by a punch, just altogether smaller than its partner, taken from a different face. And the spots were not bites, not hives, not cuts. They were craters, like pockmarks of small-arms fire on a Beirut wall, stamped with heat and speed. Like craters also, the skin around them had risen but not closed.

  His story followed without my asking for it. He was a relief volunteer, sir, a third-year medical student from Omaha. He believed in peace, sir. And he had been in this bombing, down by the Corniche, in this restaurant that had been one of the worst-hit places, just wiped out, you should go down there and take a look, a place called Akhbar’s, sir, where a lot of Americans went, there was this car bomb and car bombs are the worst. You can’t get worse than car bombs for surprise.

  I said I knew that.

  Almost everyone in the restaurant had died except himself, sir, the people nearest the wall just blew apart, he continued, unaware that he had painted my own worst nightmare for me. And now he had this thing he had written, he felt he had to say it, sir, a sort of mild statement about peace; which he needed to print in my newspaper, maybe it would do s
ome good, he was thinking of like this weekend or maybe Monday. He’d like to donate the fee to charity. He guessed it could be like a couple of hundred dollars, maybe more. In the Beirut hospitals, that still bought people a piece of hope.

  “We need a pause, sir,” he explained, in his dead voice as the woman fished a wad of typescript from his pocket for him.

  “A pause for moderation. Just a break between wars to find the middle way.”

  Only in the Commodore in Beirut could it have seemed natural that a bomb-shocked peace-seeker should be pleading a hopeless cause to a journalist who wasn’t one. Nevertheless I promised to do what I could. When I had done my business with the man I was waiting for—who knew nothing, of course, had heard nothing, but perhaps, sir, if I spoke to Colonel Asme in Tyre?—I settled in my room and with a glass at my elbow began to read his offering, determined that if it had any reasonable chance of publication, I would twist the arm of one of our numberless Fleet Street friendlies when I returned to London, and see it done.

  It was a tragic piece, and quickly it became unreadable: a rambling, emotional appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike to remember their own mothers and children, and live together in love. It urged the middle ground of compromise and gave inaccurate examples from history. It proposed a new religion “like Joan of Arc would have given us only the English wouldn’t let her, so they burned her alive, disregarding her screams and the will of the ordinary people.” This great new movement, he said, would “bind the Semitic races in a spiritual brotherhood of love and tolerance.” Then it lost its way completely, and resorted to capital letters, underlining, and rows of exclamation marks. So that by the time I reached the end, it had ceased to be what it set out to be at all, and was talking about “this whole family, kids, and grandparents, that was sitting up beside the wall nearest to the epicentre.” And how they had all been blown to pieces, not once, but over and over again, each time Sol allowed himself to look into his anguished memory.