A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  The crowd in the lobby had thinned. The Post Office clock above the sealed lift said ten thirty-five; those who dared not risk a trip to the canteen had gathered at the front desk; the Chancery Guard had made mid-morning tea, and they were drinking it and talking in subdued voices when they heard his approaching footsteps. His heels had metal quarters and they echoed against the pseudo-marble walls like shots on a valley range. The despatch riders, with that nose for authority which soldiers have, gently set down their cups and fastened the buttons of their tunics.

  ‘Macmullen?’

  He stood on the lowest step, one hand propped massively on the banister, the other clutching the embroidered cushion. To either side of him, corridors haunted with iron riot grilles and free-standing pillars of chrome led into the dark like ghettos from a splendid city. The silence was suddenly important, making a fool of all that had gone before.

  ‘Macmullen’s off duty, sir. Gone down to Naafi.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Gaunt, sir. I’m standing in for him.’

  ‘My name’s Turner. I’m checking physical security. I want to see Room Twenty-one.’

  Gaunt was a small man, a devout Welshman, with a long memory of the Depression inherited from his father. He had come to Bonn from Cardiff, where he had driven motor-cars for the police. He carried the keys in his right hand, low down by his side, and his gait was square and rather solemn, so that as he preceded Turner into the dark mouth of the corridor, he resembled a miner making for the pithead.

  ‘Shocking really, all what they’ve been up to,’ Gaunt chanted, talking ahead of him and letting the sound carry backwards. ‘Peter Aldock, he’s my stringer, see, he’s got a brother in Hanover, used to be with the Occupation, married a German girl and opened a grocer’s shop. Terrified he was for sure: well, he says, they all know my George is English. What’ll happen to him? Worse than the Congo. Hullo there, Padre!’

  The Chaplain sat at a portable typewriter in a small white cell opposite the telephone exchange, beneath a picture of his wife, his door wide open for confession. A rush cross was tucked behind the cord. ‘Good morning, John then,’ he replied in a slightly reproving tone which recalled for both of them the granite intractability of their Welsh God; and Gaunt said, ‘Hullo there,’ again but did not alter his pace. From all around them came the unmistakable sounds of a multi-lingual community: the lonely German drone of the Head Press Reader dictating a translation; the bark of the travel clerk shouting into the telephone; the distant whistling, tuneful and un-English, that seemed to come from everywhere, piped in from other corridors. Turner caught the smell of salami and second breakfasts, of newsprint and disinfectant and he thought: all change at Zurich, you’re abroad at last.

  ‘It’s mainly the locally employed down here,’ Gaunt explained above the din. ‘They aren’t allowed no higher, being German.’ His sympathy for foreigners was felt but controlled: a nurse’s sympathy, tempered by vocation.

  A door opened to their left; a shaft of white light broke suddenly upon them, catching the poor plaster of the walls and the tattered green of a bilingual noticeboard. Two girls, about to emerge from information Registry, drew back to let them by and Turner looked them over mechanically, thinking: this was his world. Second class and foreign. One carried a thermos, the other laboured under a stack of files. Beyond them, through an outer window protected with jeweller’s screens, he glimpsed the car park and heard the roar of a motor-bike as a despatch rider drove off. Gaunt had ducked away to the right, down another passage; he stopped, and they were at the door, Gaunt fumbling with the key and Turner staring over his shoulder at the notice which hung from the centre panel: ‘Harting, Leo, Claims and Consular’, a sudden witness to the living man, or a sudden monument to the dead.

  The characters of the first two words were a good two inches high, ruled at the edges and cross-hatched in red and green crayon; the word ‘Consular’ was done a good deal larger, and the letters were outlined in ink to give them that extra substance which the title evidently demanded. Stooping, Turner lightly touched the surface; it was paper mounted on hardboard, and even by that poor light he could make out the faint ruled lines of pencil dictating the upper and lower limits of each letter; defining the borders of a modest existence perhaps; or of a life unnaturally curtailed by deceit. ‘Deceit. I’d have thought I’d have made that plain by now.’

  ‘Hurry,’ he said.

  Gaunt unlocked the door. As Turner seized the handle and shoved it open, he heard his sister’s voice on the telephone again and his own reply as he slammed down the receiver: ‘Tell her I’ve left the country.’ The windows were closed. The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn. Gaunt reached out to pull it back.

  ‘Leave it. Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’ He tossed the embroidered cushion on to a chair and peered round the room.

  The desk had chrome handles; it was better than Bradfield’s desk. The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers. Turner moved very lightly, for all his bulk, examining but never touching. An old army map hung on the wall, divided into the original zones of military occupation. The British was marked in bright green, a fertile patch among the foreign deserts. It’s like a prison cell, he thought, maximum security; maybe it’s just the bars. What a place to break out of, and who wouldn’t? The smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘Well, I am surprised,’ Gaunt was saying. ‘There’s a lot gone, I must say.’

  Turner did not look at him.

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Gadgets, all sorts. This is Mr Harting’s room,’ he explained. ‘Very gadget-minded, Mr Harting is.’

  ‘What sort of gadgets?’

  ‘Well, he had a tea machine, you know the kind that wakes you up? Made a lovely cup of tea, that did. Pity that’s gone, really.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A fire. The new fan type with the two bars over. And a lamp. A smashing one, Japanese. Go all directions, that lamp would. Turn it half-way and it burned soft. Very cheap to run as well, he told me. But I wouldn’t have one, you know, not now they’ve cut the allowances. Still,’ he continued consolingly, ‘I expect he’s taken them home, don’t you, if that’s where he’s gone.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I expect he has.’

  On the window-sill stood a transistor radio. Stooping until his eyes were on a level with the panel, Turner switched it on. At once they heard the mawkish tones of a British Forces announcer commenting on the Hanover riots and the prospects for a British victory in Brussels. Slowly Turner rolled the tuning needle along the lighted band, his ear cocked all the time to the changing babel of French, German and Dutch.

  ‘I thought you said physical security.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You haven’t hardly looked at the windows. Or the locks.’

  ‘I will, I will.’ He had found a Slav voice and he was listening with deep concentration. ‘Know him well, did you? Come in here often for a cup?’

  ‘Quite. Depends on how busy, really.’

  Switching off the radio, Turner stood up. ‘Wait outside,’ he said. ‘And give me the keys.’

  ‘What’s he done then?’ Gaunt demanded, hesitating. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘Done? Nothing. He’s on compassionate leave. I want to be alone, that’s all.’

  ‘They say he’s in trouble.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Talkers.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know. Car smash maybe. He wasn’t at choir practice, see. Nor Chapel.’

  ‘Does he drive badly?’

  ‘Can’t say really.’

  Part defiant, part curious, Gaunt stayed by the door, watching as Turner pulled open the wooden wardrobe and peered inside. Three hair-dryers, still in their boxes, lay on the floor beside a pair of rubber overshoes.

 
; ‘You’re a friend of his, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not really. Only from choir, see.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Turner, staring at him now. ‘You sang for him. I used to sing in choir myself.’

  ‘Oh really now, where’s that then?’

  ‘Yorkshire,’ Turner said with awful friendliness, while his pale gaze continued to fix upon Gaunt’s plain face. ‘I hear he’s a lovely organist.’

  ‘Not at all bad, I will say,’ Gaunt agreed, rashly recognising a common interest.

  ‘Who’s his special friend; someone else in the choir, was it? A lady perhaps?’ Turner enquired, still not far from piety.

  ‘He’s not close to anyone, Leo.’

  ‘Then who does he buy these for?’

  The hair-dryers were of varying quality and complexity; the prices on the boxes ran from eighty to two hundred marks. ‘Who for?’ he repeated.

  ‘All of us. Dips, non-dips; it didn’t signify. He runs a service, see; works the diplomatic discounts. Always do you a favour, Leo will. Don’t matter what you fancy: radios, dish-washers, cars; he’ll get you a bit off, like; you know.’

  ‘Knows his way round, does he?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Takes a cut too, I expect. For his trouble,’ Turner suggested coaxingly. ‘Quite right too.’

  ‘I didn’t say so.’

  ‘Do you a girl as well, would he? Mister Fixit, is that it?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Gaunt, much shocked.

  ‘What was in it for him?’

  ‘Nothing. Not that I know of.’

  ‘Just a little friend of all the world, eh? Likes to be liked. Is that it?’

  ‘Well, we all do really, don’t we?’

  ‘Philosopher, are we?’

  ‘Always willing,’ Gaunt continued, very slow to follow the changes in Turner’s mood. ‘You ask Arthur Meadowes now, there’s an example. The moment Leo’s in Registry, not hardly a day after, he’s down here collecting the mail. “Don’t you bother,” he says to Arthur. “Save your legs, you’re not so young as you were and you’ve plenty to worry about already. I’ll fetch it for you, look.” That’s Leo. Obliging. Saintly really, considering his disadvantages.’

  ‘What mail?’

  ‘Everything. Classified or Unclassified, it didn’t make no difference. He’d be down here signing for it, taking it up to Arthur.’

  Very still, Turner said, ‘Yes, I see that. And maybe he’d drop in here on the way, would he? Check on his own room; brew up a cup of tea.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Gaunt, ‘always ready to oblige.’ He opened the door. ‘Well, I’ll be leaving you to it.’

  ‘You stay here,’ said Turner, still watching him. ‘You’ll be all right. You stay and talk to me, Gaunt. I like company. Tell me about his disadvantages.’

  Returning the hair-dryers to their boxes, he pulled out a linen jacket, still on its hanger. A summer jacket; the kind that barmen wear. A dead rose hung from the buttonhole.

  ‘What disadvantages?’ he asked, throwing the rose into the wastebag. ‘You can tell me, Gaunt,’ and he noticed the smell again, the wardrobe smell he had caught but not defined, the sweet, familiar, continental smell of male unguents and cigar.

  ‘Only his childhood, that’s all. He had an uncle.’

  ‘Tell me about the uncle.’

  ‘Nothing; only how he was daft. Always changing politics. He had a lovely way of narrative, Leo did. Told us how he used to sit down in the cellar in Hampstead with his uncle while the bombs were falling, making pills in a machine. Dried fruit. Squashed them all up and rolled them in sugar, then put them in the tins, see. Used to spit on them, Leo did, just to spite his uncle. My wife was very shocked when she heard that – I said don’t be silly, that’s deprivation. He hasn’t had the love, see, not what you’ve had.’

  Having felt the pockets, Turner cautiously detached the jacket from the hanger and held the shoulders against his own substantial frame.

  ‘Little bloke?’

  ‘He’s a keen dresser,’ said Gaunt, ‘always well turned out, Leo is.’

  ‘Your size?’

  Turner held the jacket towards him, but Gaunt drew back in distaste.

  ‘Smaller,’ he said, his eyes still on the jacket. ‘More the dancer type. Butterfly. You’d think he wore pumps all the time.’

  ‘Pansy?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Gaunt, very shocked again, and colouring at the notion.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He’s a decent fellow, that’s why,’ said Gaunt, fiercely. ‘Even if he has done something wrong.’

  ‘Pious?’

  ‘Respectful, very. And about religion. Never cheeky or brash, although he was foreign.’

  ‘What else did he say about his uncle?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What else about his politics?’ He was looking at the desk, examining the locks on the drawers.

  Tossing the jacket on to a chair, he held out his hand for the keys. Reluctantly Gaunt released them.

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know nothing about his politics.’

  ‘Who says anything about him doing something wrong?’

  ‘You. All this hunting him. Measuring him; I don’t fancy it.’

  ‘What would he have done, I wonder? To make me hunt him like this?’

  ‘God only knows.’

  ‘In his wisdom.’ He had opened the top drawers. ‘Have you got a diary like this?’

  It was bound in blue rexine and stamped in gold with the royal crest.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Poor Gaunt. Too humble?’ He was turning the pages, working back. Once he stopped and frowned; once he wrote something in his black notebook.

  ‘It was Counsellors and above, that’s why,’ Gaunt retorted. ‘I wouldn’t accept it.’

  ‘He offered you one, did he? That was another of his fiddles, I suppose. What happened? He scrounged a bundle did he, from Registry, and handed them out to his old chums on the Ground Floor. “Here you are, boys: the streets are paved with gold up there. Here’s a keepsake from your old winger.” Is that the way of it, Gaunt? And Christian virtue held you back, did it?’ Closing the diary, he pulled open the lower drawers.

  ‘What if he did? You’ve no call to go rifling through his desk there, have you? Not for a little thing like that! Pinching a handful of diaries; well, that’s hardly all the world, is it?’ His Welsh accent had jumped all the hurdles and was running free.

  ‘You’re a Christian man, Gaunt. You know how the devil works better than I do. Little things lead to big things, don’t they? Pinch an apple one day, you’ll be hi-jacking a lorry the next. You know the way it goes, Gaunt. What else did he tell you about himself? Any more little childhood reminiscences?’

  He had found a paper knife, a slim, silver affair with a broad, flat handle, and he was reading the engraving by the desk lamp.

  ‘L. H. from Margaret. Now who was Margaret, I wonder?’

  ‘I never heard of her.’

  ‘He was engaged to be married once, did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Miss Aickman. Margaret Aickman. Ring a bell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about the Army. Did he tell you about that?’

  ‘He loved the Army. In Berlin, he said, he used to watch the cavalry going over the jumps. He loved it.’

  ‘He was in the infantry, was he?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘No.’

  Turner had put the knife aside, next to the blue diary, made another note in his pocket-book and picked up a small flat tin of Dutch cigars.

  ‘Smoker?’

  ‘He liked a cigar. Yes. That’s all he smoked, see. Always carried cigarettes, mind. But I only ever saw him smoke those things. There was one or two in Chancery complained, so I hear. About the cigars. Didn’t fancy them. But Leo could be stubborn when he had the mind, I will say.’

  ‘How long have you been here, Gaunt?’


  ‘Five years.’

  ‘He was in a fight in Cologne. That in your time?’

  Gaunt hesitated.

  ‘Amazing the way things are hushed up here, I must say. You give a new meaning to the “need to know”, you do. Everyone knows except the people who need to. What happened?’

  ‘It was just a fight. They say he asked for it, that’s all.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. They say he deserved it, see. I heard from my predecessor: they brought him back one night, you couldn’t hardly recognise him, that’s what he said. Serve him right, he said; that’s what they told him. Mind you, he could be pugnacious, I’m not denying it.’

  ‘Who? Who told him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. That would be prying.’

  ‘Often fighting, is he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there a woman involved? Margaret Aickman perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then why’s he pugnacious?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gaunt said, torn once more between suspicion and a native passion for communication. ‘Why are you then for that matter?’ he muttered, venturing aggression, but Turner ignored him.

  ‘That’s right. Never pry. Never tell on a friend. God wouldn’t like it. I admire a man who sticks to his principles.’

  ‘I don’t care what he’s done,’ Gaunt continued, gathering courage as he went. ‘He wasn’t a bad man. He was a bit sharp maybe, but so he would be, being continental, we all know that.’ He pointed to the desk and the open drawers. ‘But he wasn’t bad like this.’

  ‘No one is. Know that? No one’s ever this bad. That’s what mercy’s about. We’re all lovely people, really. There’s a hymn about that, isn’t there? One of the hymns he used to play, and you and I used to sing, Gaunt, before we grew up and got elegant. That’s a lovely thing about hymns: we never forget them, do we. Like limericks. God knew a thing or two when he invented rhyme I will say. What did he learn when he was a kid, tell me that? What did Leo learn on his uncle’s knee, eh?’

  ‘He could speak Italian,’ Gaunt said suddenly, as if it were a trump card he had been holding back.

  ‘He could, could he?’

  ‘And he learnt it in England. At the Farm School. The other kids wouldn’t speak to him, see, him being German, so he used to go out on a bicycle and talk to the Italian prisoners of war. And he’s never forgotten it, never. He’s got a lovely memory, I tell you. Never forgets a word you say to him, I’m sure.’