The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  “Not even on your trips to Russia together?” I ventured, taking another leap for him.

  “Nowhere, thank you. It would have ruined them, as a matter of fact. Killed them stone dead.”

  “So it’s all hearsay, what they say about his women?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s what Sergei told me himself. Sergei Modrian had a totally ruthless attitude to women. His colleagues confirmed this to me privately. Ruthless.”

  I found time to marvel at Modrian’s psychological dexterity—or was it the dexterity of his masters? Between Modrian the ruthless pursuer of women, and Frewin the ruthless rejecter of them, there was indeed a natural bond.

  “So you met his colleagues too,” I said. “In Moscow, presumably. At Christmas.”

  “Only the ones he trusted. Their respect for him was incredible. Or Leningrad. I wasn’t fussy, I’d no right to be. I was an honoured guest. I went along with whatever they’d arranged for me.”

  I kept my eyes on my notebook. God knows what I was writing by then. Gobbledygook. Afterwards, there were whole tracts I couldn’t read a word of. I selected my absolutely dullest tone.

  “And was all this in honour of your remarkable linguistic abilities, Cyril? Or were you already providing informal services for Modrian by then? Like giving him information or whatever. Translating and so on. A lot do it, I’m told. They’re not supposed to, of course. But you can’t blame people—can you?—wanting to help the glasnost along, now it’s come. We’ve waited long enough. Only, I’ve got to put the proper history to this, Cyril. They’ll skin me otherwise.”

  I did not dare look up. I simply kept writing. I turned a page and wrote: keep talking, keep talking, keep talking. And still I did not look up.

  I heard him whisper something I couldn’t understand. I heard him mutter, “It’s not. I didn’t. I never bloody did.” I heard him complain more loudly: “Don’t say that, do you mind? Don’t you ever say that again, you and your HQ. ‘Giving him information’—what’s all that about? They’re wrong words. I’m talking to you, Ned!”

  I looked up, sucking on my pipe and smiling. “Are you, Cyril? Of course you are. I’m sorry. You’re my sixth in a week to be honest. They’re all doing the glasnost these days. It’s the fashion. I’m beginning to feel my age.”

  He decided to comfort me. He sat down. Not in the chair, but on its arm. He put on an avuncular, friend-to-friend manner that reminded me of my preparatory-school headmaster.

  “You’re by way of being a liberal yourself, aren’t you, Ned? You’ve got the face for it anyway, even if you are a bit of a toady for HQ.”

  “I suppose I’m a sort of free thinker in my way, yes, I conceded. “Though I do have my pension to consider, naturally.”

  “Of course you are! You favour a mixed economy, don’t you? You don’t like public poverty and private wealth any more than I do. Humanity above ideology, you believe in that? Stop the derailed tram of capitalism destroying all before it in its path? Of course you do! You’ve got a sensible concern for the environment, I dare say. Badgers, whales, fur coats, power stations. Even a vision of sharing, where it doesn’t impinge. Brothers and sisters marching together towards common goals, culture and music for all! Freedom of movement and choice of allegiance! Peace! Well, then.”

  “Makes good sense to me,” I said.

  “You’re not old enough to have done the thirties; neither am I. I wouldn’t have held with them if I had been. We’re good men, that’s all we are. Reasonable men. That’s what Sergei was too. You and Sergei—I can see it in your face, Ned, it’s no good your trying to hide it, you’re birds of a feather. So don’t go painting me black and you white, because we’re like minds, same as me and Sergei were. On the same side against the wickedness, the lack of culture, the filth. ‘We’re “the unrecognised aristocracy”’—that’s what Sergei called us. He was right. You’re one too, that’s all I’m saying. I mean, who else is there? Who’s the alternative to what we see around us every day, the degradation, the waste, the disrespect? Who are we going to listen to, up there in the attic at night, twiddling the dials? Not the yuppies, that’s for sure. Not the pigs-in-clover lot—what have they got to say? Not the make-more spend-more be-more school, they’re no help. Not the knickersand-tits brigade, either. And we’re not going to convert to Islam in a hurry, are we, not while they go round pinching countries off each other and doing the poison gas. So I mean what’s the alternative for a feeling man, a man of conscience, now the Russians are abandoning their responsibilities right and left and putting on the hair shirt? Who’s out there for us? Where’s the vision any more? Where’s the relief? The friendship? Someone’s got to fill the gap. I can’t be left in the air. I can’t be without. Not after Sergei, Ned— I’d die. Sergei was the most important man on earth to me. Drink, meat and laughter, Sergei was. He was my total meaning. What’s going to happen? That’s what I want to know. There’s some heads could roll, in my view. Sergei had the ideology. I don’t see it in you—I don’t think I do anyway. I get a glimpse of it, a longing here and there, then I’m not at all sure. I don’t know you’ve got the quality.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “I don’t know you’ve got the wit. The dance. I thought that as you came in. I compared you with Sergei in my mind, and I’m afraid I found you seriously wanting. Sergei didn’t shuffle in like a deadbeat; he took me by storm. Rings the bell, marches in as if he’s bought the place, sits down where you’re sitting, but more awake—not that he ever sat anywhere long. Sergei didn’t, he was a shocking fidget, even at the opera. Then he grins like an elf and lifts up a glass of his own vodka. ‘Congratulations, Mr. Nemo,’ he says. ‘Or may I call you C? You’ve won the competition and I’m the first prize.’”

  He passed the back of his hand across his mouth, and Irealised that he was wiping away a grin. “He was a real flyer, Sergei was.”

  He was laughing, so I laughed with him. Modrian was his false freedom, I was thinking. As Sally is mine.

  “He hadn’t even taken his coat off,” he continued. “He went straight into his pitch. ‘Now the first thing we’ve got to talk about is the ceremony,’ he says. ‘Nothing flashy, Mr. Nemo, just a couple of friends of mine, who happen to be Boris and Olga, plus one or two high dignitaries from the Board, and small reception for a few of your many admirers in Moscow.’

  “‘At your Embassy?’ I said. ‘I’m not coming there. My office would kill me—you don’t know Gorst.’

  “‘No, no, Mr. Nemo,’ he says. ‘No, no, Mr. C. I’m not talking about the Embassy—who cares about the Embassy. I’m talking about Moscow State University foreign language school and the official inauguration of your honorary studentship with full civilian honours.’

  “I thought I was dead at first. My heart had stopped beating. I could feel it. I’d never been beyond Dover in my life, let alone Russia, although I was Foreign Office. ‘Come to Moscow?’ I said. ‘You’re off your head,’ I said. ‘I’m a cypher clerk, not a trade union leader with an ulcer. I can’t come to Moscow at the drop of a hat’ I said. ‘Even if there is a prize at the end of it, and Olga and Boris waiting to shake my hand, and studentships and I don’t know what. You don’t seem to understand the position at all. I’m in highly sensitive work,’ I said. ‘The people aren’t that sensitive, but the work is. I’ve got constant and regular access to top secret and above. I’m not just anybody off the street, into your plane to Moscow and nobody’s the wiser. I thought I put that in my essays, some of them.’

  “‘Then come to Salzburg,’ he says. ‘Who’s counting? Take a plane to Salzburg, say you’re doing the music there, slip up to Vienna, I’ll have the air tickets ready—all right, it’s Aeroflot but it’s only two hours—no nonsense with the passports when we arrive, we’ll keep the ceremony family, who’s the wiser?’ Then he hands me this document like a scroll, all with the burned edges and that, the full formal invitation, signed by the whole Board, English one side, Russian the other. I read the English, I d
on’t mind telling you. I wasn’t going to sit in front of him with a dictionary for an hour, was I? I’d have looked a total idiot, me a top language student.” He paused—a little shamefully, I thought. “Then I told him my name,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done, really, but I’d had enough of being Nemo. I wanted to be me.”

  Now you must lose me for a minute, as I lost Cyril. Until now, I had managed to stay abreast of his references. Where I had dared, I had even led them. Now suddenly he was running free and I was struggling to keep up with him. He was in Russia, but I wasn’t. He’d given me no warning that he’d gone there. He was talking about Boris and Olga, not how they sounded any more, but how they looked; and how Boris had flung his arms round him, and how Olga had given him a demure but heartfelt Russian kiss—he didn’t hold with kissing as a rule, Ned, but with the Russians it wasn’t Gorst’s kind of kissing at all, so you didn’t mind. You even got to respect it, Ned, it being all part of what Russians regard as comradely. Frewin was looking twenty years younger and talking about being made a fuss of, all the birthdays, that he’d never had. Olga and Boris in the flesh, Ned, no side to them, just natural, same as they were in their lessons.

  “‘Congratulations, Cyril,’ she says to me, ‘on your completely phenomenal progress in the Russian language.’ Well, through interpreters, naturally, I wasn’t that far on, as I told her. Then Boris puts his arm round me. ‘We’re proud to be of assistance, Cyril,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of our students fall by the wayside, to be truthful, but those as don’t make up for all the rest.’”

  And by then at last I had pieced together the scene that he was painting for me in such broad, unpredicated strokes: his first Christmas in Russia, and for Frewin, I had no doubt, his first good Christmas anywhere, and Sergei Modrian playing ringmaster at his side. They are in a great room somewhere in Moscow, with chandeliers and speeches and a presentation and fifty handpicked extras from Moscow Central Casting, and Frewin in paradise, which is exactly where Modrian wishes him to be.

  Then, as abruptly as Frewin had treated me to this memory he abandoned it. The light went out of his eyes, his head tipped to one side, and he beetled his eyebrows as if in judgment at his own behaviour.

  Prudently, I returned him to time present. “So where is it?” I said. “The scroll he gave you. Here? The scroll, Cyril. Appointing you. Where?”

  He stared, at me, slowly waking. “I had to give it back to Sergei. ‘When we’re in Moscow, Cyril’ he said, ‘you shall have it hanging on your wall and framed in gold. Not here. I wouldn’t put you in the danger.’ He’d thought of everything, Sergei had, and he was quite right, what with you and your HQ snooping on me night and day.”

  I allowed no pause, no alteration in my voice, not even in the direction of casualness. I lowered my eyes again and dug once more in my inside pocket. I was his candidate as Sergei’s replacement, and he was courting me. He was showing me his tricks and asking me to take him on. Instinct told me to make him work harder for me. I addressed myself to the notebook again, and I spoke exactly as if I were asking him the name of his maternal grandfather.

  “So when did you start giving Sergei all these great British secrets?” I said. “Well, what we call secrets, anyway. Obviously what was secret a few years ago is not going to be the same as what’s secret today, is it? We didn’t win the Cold War by secrecy, did we? We won it with the openness. The glasnost.”

  It was the second time I had mentioned passing over secrets, but on this occasion, when I crossed the Rubicon for him, he came with me. Yet he seemed not even to notice he was on the other side.

  “Correct. That’s how we won it. And Sergei didn’t even want the secrets at first, either. ‘Secrets, Cyril, they’re unimportant to me,’ he said. ‘Secrets, Cyril, in the changing world in which we live, I’m pleased to say, they’re a drug on the market,’ he said. ‘I’d rather keep our friendship on a non-official basis. However, if I do require something in that line, you may count on me to let you know.’ In the meantime, he said, it would be quite sufficient if I wrote him a few unofficial reports on the quality of Radio Moscow’s programmes just to keep his bosses happy. Whether the reception was good enough, for example. You’d think they’d know that, really, but they don’t. You never know with Russians where you’re going to strike the ignorance in them, to be frank. That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact. He’d like my opinion of the course as well, he said, for standards of instruction generally, any suggestions I might have for Boris and Olga in the future, me being somewhat of an unusual pupil in my own right.”

  “So what changed it?”

  “Changed what? Be lucid, please, Ned. I’m not nobody, you know. I’m not Mr. Nemo. I’m Cyril.”

  What changed Sergei’s reluctance to take secrets from you?” I said.

  “His Embassy did. The diehards. The barbarians. They always do. They prevailed on him. They declined to recognize the course of history; they preferred to remain total troglodytes in their caves and continue with their ridiculous Cold War.”

  I said I did not understand him. I said he was a bit above my head.

  “Yes, well I’m not surprised. I’ll put it this way. There was lot of them in that Embassy didn’t like the time given over to cultural friendship, for a start. There was this internal rivalry going on between the camps. I was an impotent spectator. The doves, they were in favour of the culture, naturally, and above all they were in favour of the glasnost. They saw culture filling the vacuum left behind by the withdrawal hostilities. Sergei explained that to me. But the hawks—including the Ambassador, I regret to say— wanted Sergei concentrating more on the continuation of old attitudes, what’s left of them, gathering intelligence and generally acting in aggressive and conspiratorial manner regardless of the changes in the world climate. The Embassy diehards didn’t care about Sergei being an idealist, not at all. Well, they wouldn’t, would they, any more than what Gorst does. Sergei had to tread a highly precarious path, frankly, a bit for one side, then a bit for the other. So did I, it was duty. We’d do our culture together, a bit of language, a bit of art or music then we’d do some secrets to satisfy the hawks. We had to justify ourselves to all parties, same as you with your HQ and me with the Tank.”

  He was fading, I was losing him. I had to use the whip. “So when?” I asked impatiently.

  “When what?”

  “Don’t be clever with me, Cyril, do you mind? I’ve got to get this down. Look at the time. When did you start giving Sergei Modrian information, what did you give him, what for, how much for, when did it stop, and why, when it could perfectly well have continued? I’d like a weekend, Cyril, if you don’t mind. So would my wife. I’d like to put my feet up in front of the telly. I’m not paid overtime, you know. It’s strictly piecework, what they offer. One candidate’s the same as another, when it comes to payday. We’re living in a time of cost effectiveness, in case you haven’t noticed. They tell me we could be privatised if we’re not careful.”

  He didn’t hear me. He didn’t want to. He was wandering in his body and in his mind, looking for distraction, for somewhere to hide. My anger was not all simulated. I was beginning to hate Modrian. I was angry about how much we depended on the credulity of the innocent in order to survive. It was sickening me that a trickster like Modrian had contrived to turn Frewin’s loneliness to treachery. I felt threatened by the notion of love as the antithesis of duty.

  I stood up smartly, anger still my ally. Frewin was perched listlessly on the edge of a carved Arthurian stool with the Royal Navy’s ensign stitched into the seat.

  “Show me your toys,” I ordered him.

  “What toys? I’m a man, if you don’t mind, not an infant. It’s my house. Don’t tell me what to do.”

  I was remembering Modrian’s tradecraft, the stuff he used, the way he equipped his agents. I was remembering my own tradecraft, from the days when I had run Frewin’s counterparts against the Soviet target, even if they were not quite as a bad as Frewin. I was i
magining how I would have handled a high-access walk-in like Frewin, living on borrowed sanity.

  “I want to see your camera, don’t I?” I said petulantly. “Your high-speed transmitter, right, Cyril? Your signals plan. Your onetime codepads. Your crystals. Your white carbons for your secret writing. Your concealment devices. I want to see them, Cyril, I want to put them in my briefcase for Monday; then I want to go home and watch Arsenal against United. That may not be your taste, but it happens to be mine. So can we move this along a bit and cut out the bullshit, please?”

  The madness was running out, I could feel it. He was drained and so was I. He sat head down and knees spread, staring dully at his hands. I could sense the end beginning for him—the moment when the penitent grows tired of his confession and of the emotions that compelled it.

  “Cyril, I’m getting a bit edgy,” I said.

  And when he still didn’t respond, I strode to his telephone, the same one that Monty’s fake engineer had made permanently live. I dialled Burr’s direct line and heard his fancy secretary on the other end, the same one who hadn’t known my name.

  “Darling?” I said. “I’m going to be about another hour if I’m lucky. I’ve got a slow one. Yes, all right, I know, I’m sorry. Well, I said I’m sorry. Yes, of course.”

  I rang off and stared at him accusingly. He climbed slowly to his feet and led me upstairs. His attic was a spare bedroom roof high. His radio receiver stood on a table in the corner—German, just as Monty had said. I switched it on while he watched me, and we heard an accented female Russian voice talking indignantly about Moscow’s criminal mafia.

  “Why do they do that?” Frewin burst out at me, as if I were responsible. “The Russians. Why do they run down their own country all the time? They never used to. They were proud. I was proud too. All the cornfields, the classlessness, the chess, the cosmonauts, and ballet, the athletes. It was paradise till they started running it down. They’ve forgotten the good in themselves. It’s bloody disgraceful. That’s what I told Sergei.”