A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  ‘Then why look for him?’

  ‘Why not? That’s how we spend our lives, isn’t it? Looking for people we’ll never find.’

  He walked slowly down the stairs to the hall. From another flat came the growl of a cocktail party. A group of Arabs, very drunk, swept past him pulling off their coats and shouting. He waited on the doorstep. Across the river, the narrow lights of Chamberlain’s Petersberg hung like a necklace in the warm dark. A new block stood directly before him. It seemed to have been built from the top, beginning with the crane and working downwards. He thought he had seen it before from a different angle. A railway bridge straddled the end of the avenue. As the express thundered over it, he saw the silent diners grazing at their food.

  ‘The Embassy,’ he said. ‘British Embassy.’

  ‘Englische Botschaft?’

  ‘Not English. British. I’m in a hurry.’

  The driver swore at him, shouting about diplomats. They drove extremely fast and once they nearly hit a tram.

  ‘Get a bloody move on, can’t you?’

  He demanded a receipt. The driver kept a rubber stamp and a pad in his glove tray, and he hit the paper so hard that it crumpled. The Embassy was a ship, all its windows blazing. Black figures moved in the lobby with the slow coupling of a ballroom dance. The car park was full. He threw away the receipt. Lumley didn’t countenance taxi fares. It was a new rule since the last cut. There was no one he could claim from. Except Harting, whose debts appeared to be accumulating.

  Bradfield was in conference, Miss Peate said. He would probably be flying to Brussels with the Ambassador before morning. She had put away her papers and was fiddling with a blue leather placement tray, fitting the names round a dinner table in order of precedence, and she spoke to him as if it were her duty to frustrate him. And de Lisle was at the Bundestag, listening to the debate on Emergency Legislation.

  ‘I want to see the Duty Officer’s keys.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can only have them with Mr Bradfield’s consent.’

  He fought with her and that was what she wanted. He overcame her and that was what she wanted too. She gave him a written authority signed by Administration Section and countersigned by the Minister (Political). He took it to the front desk where Macmullen was on duty. Macmullen was a big, steady man, sometime sergeant of Edinburgh constabulary, and whatever he had heard about Turner had given him no pleasure.

  ‘And the night book,’ Turner said. ‘Show me the night book since January.’

  ‘Please,’ said Macmullen and stood over him while he looked through it in case he took it away. It was half past eight and the Embassy was emptying. ‘See you in the morning,’ Mickie Crabbe whispered as he passed. ‘Old boy.’

  There was no reference to Harting.

  ‘Mark me in,’ Turner said, pushing the book across the counter. ‘I’ll be in all night.’

  As Leo was, he thought.

  9

  Guilty Thursday

  There were about fifty keys and only half a dozen were labelled. He stood in the first-floor corridor where Leo had stood, drawn back into the shadow of a pillar, staring at the cypher-room door. It was about seven thirty, Leo’s time, and he imagined Jenny Pargiter coming out with a bundle of papers in her arms. The corridor was very noisy now, and the steel trap on the cypher-room door was rising and falling like a guillotine for the Registry girls to hand in telegrams and collect them; but that Thursday night had been a quiet time, a lull in the mounting crisis, and Leo had spoken to her here, where Turner stood now. He looked at his watch and then at the keys again and thought: five minutes. What would he have done? The noise was deafening; worse than day; not only the voices but the very pounding of the machines proclaimed a world entering emergency. But that night was calm, and Leo was a creature of silence, waiting here to draw his quarry and destroy. In five minutes.

  He walked along the corridor as far as the lobby and looked down into the stair well and watched the evening shift of typists slip into the dark, survivors from a burning ship, letting the night recover them. Brisk but nonchalant would be his manner, for Jenny would watch him all the way till here; and Gaunt or Macmullen would see him descend these stairs; brisk but not triumphant.

  He stood in the lobby. But what a risk, he thought suddenly; what a hazardous game. The crowd parted to admit two German officials. They were carrying black briefcases and they walked portentously as though they had come to perform an operation. They wore grey scarves put on before the overcoat, and folded broad and flat like Russian tunics. What a risk. She could revoke; she could pursue him; she would know within minutes, if she had not known already, that Leo was lying, she would know the moment she reached the lobby and heard no singing from the Assembly Room, saw no trace at all of a dozen singers entered in the night book, saw no hats and coats on those very pegs beside the door where the German officials were even now disencumbering themselves; she would know that Harting Leo, refugee, fringe-man, lover manqué and trader in third-rate artifices, had lied to her to get the keys.

  ‘A gift of love, an act of love: how can I expect a man to understand that?’

  Before entering the corridor, he stopped and examined the lift. The gold-painted door was bolted; the central panel of glass was black, boarded from the inside. Two heavy steel bars had been fastened horizontally for added security.

  ‘How long’s that been there?’

  ‘Since Bremen, sir,’ Macmullen said.

  ‘When was Bremen?’

  ‘January, sir. Late January. The Office advised it, sir. They sent a man out specially. He did the cellars and the lift, sir.’ Macmullen gave information as if it were evidence before the bailies of Edinburgh, in a series of verbal drill movements, breathing at regulation intervals. ‘He worked the whole weekend,’ Macmullen added with awe; for he was a self-indulgent man and readily exhausted by work.

  He made his way slowly through the gloom to Harting’s room thinking: these doors would be closed; these lights extinguished, these rooms silent. Was there a moon to shine through the bars? Or only these blue night lights burning for a cheaper Britain, and his own footsteps echoing in the vaults?

  Two girls passed him, dressed for the emergency. One wore jeans and she looked at him very straight, guessing his weight. Jesus, he thought, quite soon I’m going to grab one, and he unlocked the door to Leo’s room and stood there in the dark. What were you up to, he wondered, you little thief?

  Tins. Cigar tins would do, filled with white hardening putty; a child’s plasticine from that big Woolworths in Bad Godesberg would do; a little white talc to ensure a clean imprint. Three movements of the key, this side, that side, a straight stab into the flesh, and make sure the shoulders are clearly visible. It may not be a perfect fit; that depends on the blanks and the print, but a nice soft metal will yield a little in the womb and form itself to fit the inner walls … Come on, Turner, the sergeant used to say, you’d find it if it had hairs round it. He had them ready, then. All fifty tins? Or just one?

  Just one key. Which? Which Aladdin’s cave, which secret chamber hid the secret treasures of this grumbling English house?

  Harting, you thief. He began on Harting’s own door, just to annoy him, to bring it home to an absent thief that his door can be fiddled with as well, and he worked slowly along the passage fitting the keys to the locks, and each time he found a key that matched he took it off the ring and dropped it into his pocket and thought: what good did that do you? Most of the doors were not even locked, so that the keys were redundant anyway: cupboards, lavatories, washrooms, rest rooms, offices, a first-aid room that stank of alcohol and a junction box for electric cables.

  A microphone job? Was that the nature of your technical interest, thief? The gimmicks, the flex, the hair-dryers, the bits and pieces: was that all a lovely cover for carting in some daft conjuring set for eavesdropping? ‘Balls,’ he said out loud, and with a dozen keys already tapping against his thigh, he plodded up the stairs again straight into the a
rms of the Ambassador’s private secretary, a strutting, fussy man who had borrowed a good deal of his master’s authority.

  ‘H. E. will be leaving in a minute; I should make yourself scarce if I were you,’ he said with chilling ease. ‘He’s not awfully keen on you people.’

  In most of the corridors it was daytime. Commercial Section was celebrating Scottish week. A mauve grouse moor, draped in Campbell tartan, hung beside a photograph of the Queen in highland dress. Miniatures of Scotch whisky were mounted in a collage with dancers and bagpipes, and framed in plywood battens. In the Open Plan, under radiant exhortations to buy from the North, pale-faced clerks struck doggedly at machines for adding and subtracting. Deadline Brussels! a placard warned them, but the machines seemed unimpressed. He climbed a floor and was in Whitehall with the Service Attachés, each with his tiny Ministry and his stencilled title on the door.

  ‘What the hell are you up to?’ a sergeant clerk demanded, and Turner told him to keep a civil tongue in his head. Somewhere a military voice wrestled gallantly with dictation. In the Typing Pool, the girls sat forlornly in schoolroom lines: two juniors in green overalls gently nursed a mammoth duplicator while a third laid out the coloured telegrams as if they were fine linen for going away. Raised above them all, the Head Girl, blue haired and fully sixty, sat on a separate dais checking stencils. She alone, scenting the enemy, looked up sharply, nose towards the wind. The walls behind here were lined with Christmas cards from Head Girls in other missions. Some depicted camels, others the royal crest.

  ‘I’m going over the locks,’ he muttered, and her look said, ‘Go over what you like, but not my girls.’

  Christ, I could do with one, I’m telling you. Surely you could spare just one for a quick drop into paradise? Harting, you thief.

  It was ten o’clock. He had visited every room to which Harting had acquired access; he had gained nothing but a headache for his trouble. Whatever Harting wanted was no longer there, or else so hidden as to require weeks of searching; or so obvious as to be invisible. He felt the sickness which follows tension and his mind was racing with uncoordinated recollections. Christ: one single day. From enthusiasm to frustration in one day. From an aeroplane to the dayroom desk, all the clues and none; I’ve lived a whole bloody life and it’s only Monday. He stared at the blank foolscap pages of the telegram form, wondering what the hell to write. Cork was asleep and the robots were silent. The keys lay in a heap before him. One by one he began threading them back on to the ring. Put together, he thought; construct. You will not go to bed until you are at least aware of the trail you must follow. The task of an intellectual, his fart-arsed tutor brayed, is to make order out of chaos. Define anarchy. It is a mind without a system. Please, teacher, what is a system without a mind? Taking a pencil he lazily drew a chart of the days of the week and divided each day into panels of one hour. He opened the blue diary. Re-form the fragments, make of all the pieces one piece. You’ll find him and Shawn won’t. Harting Leo, Claims and Consular, thief and hunter, will hunt you down.

  ‘You don’t know anything about shares by any chance?’ Cork enquired, waking with a start.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘My query is, you see,’ he continued, rubbing his pink eyes, ‘if there’s a slump on Wall Street and a slump in Frankfurt and we don’t make the Market on this run, how will it affect Swedish steel?’

  ‘If I were you,’ Turner said, ‘I’d put the whole lot on red and forget it.’

  ‘Only I have this firm intention,’ Cork explained. ‘We’ve got a bit of land lined up in the Caribbean –’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Construct. Put your ideas on a blackboard and then see what happens to them. Come on, Turner, you’re a philosopher, tell us how the world goes round. What little absolute will we put into Harting’s mouth, for instance? Facts. Construct. Did you not, after all, my dear Turner, abandon the contemplative life of the academic in favour of the functional life of the civil servant? Construct; put your theories to work and de Lisle will call you a real person.

  Mondays first. Mondays are for invitations out. Buffet parties are favoured, de Lisle had told him in an aside at luncheon; they eliminate the pains of placement. Mondays are reserved for away matches. England plays the wogs. Away to a different kind of slavery. Harting was essentially a second-division man. The minor Embassies. Embassies with small drawing-rooms. The B team played away on Mondays.

  ‘– and if it’s a girl, I reckon we could get a coloured nanny, an Amah; she could do the teaching, up to O-level at least.’

  ‘Can’t you keep quiet?’

  ‘Provided we have the funds,’ Cork added. ‘You can’t get them for nothing, I’m sure.’

  ‘I’m working, can’t you understand?’

  I’m trying, he thought, and his mind drifted into other fields. He was with the little girl in the corridor, whose full unpainted lips faded so reluctantly into the feathery skin; he imagined that long appraising stare upon his nascent paunch and he heard her laughing as his own wife had laughed: Alan darling, you’re supposed to take me, not fight me. It’s rhythm, it’s like dancing, can’t you understand? And Tony’s such a beautiful dancer, Alan darling, and I shall be a little late tonight, and I shall be away tomorrow, playing an away match with my Monday lover. Alan, stop. Stop! Alan, please don’t hit me! I’ll never touch him again, I swear. Until Tuesday.

  Harting, you thief.

  Tuesdays were for entertaining at home. Home is a Tuesday; home is having people in. He made a list of them and thought: it’s worse than Blackheath. It’s worse than her bloody mother fighting for her fragment of power; it’s worse than Bournemouth and seed cake for the minister; it’s worse than black Sundays in Yorkshire and weddings timed for six o’clock tea; it is a custom-built, unassailable preventive detention of vacuous social exchange. The Vandelungs (Dutch) … the Canards (Canadian) … the Obutus (Ghanaian) … the Cortezanis (Italian) … the Allertons, the Crabbes, and once, sure enough, the Bradfields; this happy band was mingled with no fewer than forty-eight accountable bores defined only by their quantity: the Obutus plus six … the Allertons plus two … the Bradfields alone. You gave them your full attention, didn’t you? ‘I understand he maintains a certain standard there.’ Champagne and two veg that night. Plover’s eggs paid for by the Russian taxpayer. His wife interrupted him: darling, why don’t we go out tonight? The Willoughbys won’t mind, they know I loathe cooking and Tony adores Italian food. Oh sure, sure: anything to please Tony.

  ‘– And if it’s a boy,’ Cork said, ‘I’ll take it on myself. There must be some facilities for boys, even in a place like that. I mean it’s a paradise, isn’t it, specially for teachers.’

  Wednesday was welfare. Ping-pong night. Sing-song night. The sergeants’ mess: ‘Have a little something in that gin and whisky, Mr Turner, sir, just to give it bite. The boys say one thing about you, sir, and I’m sure you won’t mind me repeating it, sir, seeing it’s Christmas: Mr Turner, they say – they always give you the Mister, sir, it’s not something they do for everyone – Mr Turner is tough; Mr Turner is firm. But Mr Turner is fair. Now, sir, about my leave …’ Exiles night. A night for worming an inch or two further into the flesh of the Embassy; come back, little girl, and just slip off those jeans. A night strictly for business. He studied the engagements in detail and thought: you really did work for your secrets, I will admit. You really hawked yourself, didn’t you? Scottish Dancing, Skittles Club, Exiles Motoring, Sports Committee. Sooner you than me, boy; you really believed. I’ll say that for you too. You really went for goal, didn’t you? You kept the ball and you went through the lot of them, you thief.

  Which left – since the weekends were not marked with anything but references to gardening and a couple of trips to Hanover – which left Thursdays.

  Guilty Thursdays.

  Draw a box round Thursday, telephone the Adler and find out what time they lock up. They don’t. Draw another box round that box, measuring one and a half inc
hes by half an inch, and decorate the margins in between with sinuous snakes; cause their forked tongues to lick suggestively at the sweet Gothic curves of the letter T, and wait for the throbbing of a tormented head to be assumed into the waking drumbeat of the cypher machines. And the result?

  Silence. Bloody silence.

  The result is a Thursday shrouded in sexual mystery, tantalised by abstinence. A Thursday surrounded by meticulous entries written in a swollen, boring mayoral hand by a man with nothing to do and a lot of time to do it in. ‘Remember Mary Crabbe’s coffee grinder,’ the worshipful mayor of Turner’s home town in Yorkshire warned his fortunate biographer; remember to grind Mary Crabbe, you thief. ‘Speak to Arthur about Myra’s birthday,’ Mr Crail the Minister, well known throughout all Yorkshire for the inanity of his sermons, whispered in a benevolent aside; ‘Anglo-German Society Buffet Luncheon for Friends of the Free City of Hamburg,’ ‘International Ladies Subscription Luncheon, Costumes of All Nations, DM. 1500. Incl. wine,’ the Master of Ceremonies proclaimed, puffing his Mess-Night capitals over the lined pages. And make a mental note to ruin Jenny Pargiter’s career. And Meadowes’ retirement. And Gaunt? And Bradfield? And who else along the path? Myra Meadowes? You wrecker, Harting.

  ‘Can’t you turn those bloody things off?’

  ‘I wish I could,’ said Cork. ‘Something’s up, don’t ask me what. Personal for Bradfield decypher yourself. Following for Bradfield by hand of officer … it must be his bloody birthday.’

  ‘Funeral more likely,’ Turner growled and returned to the diary.

  But on Thursdays Harting did have something to do, something real; and not yet realised. Something he kept quiet about. Very. Something urgent and constructive; something secret. Something that made all the other days worthwhile, something to believe in. On Thursdays, Leo Harting touched the hem; and kept his mouth shut. Not even the weekly lie was recorded. Only last Thursday carried any entry at all, and that read: ‘Maternus. One o’clock. P.’ The rest were as blank, as innocent and as unrevealing as the little virgins in the ground-floor corridor.