A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  He pulled open the drawers of the desk. They were not locked. Some were empty. Light bulbs, fuse wire, sewing materials; socks, spare cuffs for shirts; an unframed print of a galleon in full sail. He turned it over and read: ‘To darling Leo from Margaret, Hanover 1949. With fondest affection.’ The script was clearly continental. Folding it roughly, he put it in his pocket. Under the print was a box. It was a square, hard box by the feel of it, bound in a black silk handkerchief, wrapped like a parcel and pinned upon itself. Unfastening the pins he cautiously drew out a tin of dull silvery metal; it must have been painted once, for the metal had the matt uneven texture of a surface scratched clean with a fine instrument. Loosening the lid, he looked inside, then gently, almost reverently, emptied the contents on to the handkerchief. Five buttons lay before him. They were each about one inch in diameter, wooden and hand-made to the same pattern, crudely but with the greatest care, as if the maker wanted for instruments but not for application, and they were pierced twice, generously, to admit a very broad thread. Under the tin was a German text book, the property of a Bonn library, stamped and annotated by the librarian. He could not understand it very well, but it seemed to be a technical treatise on the use of military gases. The last borrower had taken it out in February of that year. Certain passages were sidelined and there were small notes in the margin: ‘Toxic effect immediate … symptoms delayed by cold weather.’ Training the light full upon them, Turner sat at the desk, his head cupped in his hand and studied them with the greatest concentration; so that only instinct made him swing round and face the tall figure in the doorway.

  He was quite an elderly man. He wore a tunic and a peaked cap of the kind that German students used to wear, or merchant sailors in the First World War. His face was dark with coaldust; he held a rusted riddling-iron like a trident across his body, and it trembled dreadfully in his old hands; but his red, stupid eyes were turned downwards to the pile of desecrated books, and he looked very angry indeed. Very slowly, Turner stood up. The old man did not move, but the riddling-iron shook wildly, and the white of his knuckles shone white through the soot. Turner ventured a pace forward.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  One black hand detached itself from the shaft and rose mechanically to the peak of his hat. Turner strode to the corner where the cartons of whisky were stacked. He ripped open the top carton, pulled out a bottle, tore off the lid. The old man was mumbling, shaking his head, still staring at the books.

  ‘Here,’ said Turner softly, ‘have a drink,’ and held the bottle forward into the old man’s line of sight.

  Listlessly he let the iron fall, took the bottle and held it to his thin lips while Turner charged past him to the kitchen. Opening the door, he shouted at the top of his voice.

  ‘De Lisle!’

  The echo carried wildly into the deserted street and outwards to the river.

  ‘De Lisle!’

  Even before he had returned to the study, the lights were going on in the windows of neighbouring houses.

  Turner had pulled open the wood shutters to let in the new daylight, and now the three of them stood in a baffled group, the old man blinking at the broken books and clutching the whisky in his shaking hand.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘The boilerman. We all have them.’

  ‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’

  The old man did not immediately reply, but instead, waking again to the whisky, drank a little more, then passed it to de Lisle, whom he appeared instinctively to trust. De Lisle set it on the desk beside the silk handkerchief and Turner quietly repeated his question, while the old man stared from one to the other, and then at the books.

  ‘Ask him when he last saw Harting.’

  At last he spoke. His voice was timeless: a slow peasant drawl, the murmur of the confessional, querulous yet subjugate, the voice of an underdog in the hopeless quest for consideration. Once he reached out his black fingers to touch the smashed beading of the bookcase; once he nodded towards the river, as if the river was where he lived; but the murmur continued through his gestures as if it came from someone else.

  ‘He sells tickets for a pleasure cruise,’ de Lisle whispered. ‘He comes at five in the evening on the way home, and first thing in the morning on the way to work. He stokes the boilers, does the dustbins and the empties. In summer he cleans the boats before the charabancs arrive.’

  ‘Ask him again. When did he last see Harting? Here’ – he produced a fifty-mark note – ‘show him this – say I’ll give it him if he tells me what I want to know.’

  Seeing the money, the old man examined Turner carefully with his dry, red eyes. His face was lined and hollow, starved at some time and held up by the long cords of his shrivelled skin, and the soot was worked into it like pigment into canvas. Folding the banknote carefully down the centre he added it to the wad from his hip pocket.

  ‘When?’ Turner demanded. ‘Wann?’

  Cautiously the old man began putting his words together, picking them one by one, articles in the bargain. He had taken off his hat; a sooty stubble covered his brown skull.

  ‘Friday,’ de Lisle quietly interpreted. His eye was on the window and he seemed distracted. ‘Leo paid him on Friday afternoon. He went round to his house and paid him on the doorstep. He said he was going on a long journey.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘He didn’t say where.’

  ‘When will he come back? Ask him that.’

  Once more, as de Lisle translated and Turner caught the half-familiar words: kommen … zurück.

  ‘Leo gave him two months’ pay. He says he has something to show us. Something that is worth another fifty marks.’

  The old man was glancing quickly from one to the other of them, fearful but expectant, while his long hand nervously explored the canvas tunic. It was a sailor’s tunic, shapeless and bleached, and it hung without relation to his narrow frame. Finding what he was looking for, he cautiously rolled back the lower hem, reached upward and detached something from his neck. As he did so he began murmuring again, but faster than before, nervous and voluble.

  ‘He found it on Saturday morning in the rubbish.’

  It was a holster made of green webbing, army issue, suitable for a three-eight pistol. It had ‘Harting Leo’ stencilled on the inside and it was empty.

  ‘In the dustbin, right on top; the first thing he saw when he lifted the lid. He didn’t show it to the others. The others shouted at him and threatened to kick his face in. The others reminded him of what they’d done to him in the war and they said they’d do it again.’

  ‘What others? Who?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Going to the window, de Lisle peered casually out. The old man was still talking.

  ‘He says he distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets in the war,’ he called, still watching. ‘By mistake. He thought they were ordinary newspapers and the others caught him and hung him upside down. That’s who the others seem to be. He says he likes the English best. He says Harting was a real gentleman. He says he wants to keep the whisky too. Leo always gave him Scotch. And cigars. Little Dutch cigars, a kind you can’t get in the shops. Leo had them sent specially. And last Christmas he gave his wife a hair-dryer. He would also like fifty marks for the holster,’ he added, but by then the cars had entered the drive, and the little room was filled with the double wail of a police horn and the double flash of a blue light. They heard the shout and the stamp of feet as the green figures gathered at the windows, pointing their guns into the room. The door was open and a young man in a leather coat held a pistol in his hand. The boilerman was crying, wailing, waiting to be hit and the blue light was rolling like a light for dancing. ‘Do nothing,’ de Lisle had said. ‘Obey no orders.’

  He was talking to the boy in the leather coat, offering his red diplomatic card for examination. His voice was quiet but very firm, a negotiator’s voice, neither flippant nor concessive, stiffened with authority and hinting at injured privilege. The young d
etective’s face was as blank as Siebkron’s. Gradually de Lisle appeared to be gaining the ascendancy. His tone changed to one of indignation. He began asking questions, and the boy became conciliatory, even evasive. Gradually Turner gathered the trend of de Lisle’s complaint. He was pointing at Turner’s notebook and then at the old man. A list, he was saying, they were making a list. Was it forbidden for diplomats to make a list? To assess dilapidation, to check the inventory of Embassy furniture? It was surely a natural enough thing to do at a time when British property was in danger of destruction. Mr Harting had gone on extended leave of absence; it was expedient to make certain dispositions, to pay the boilerman his fifty marks … And since when, de Lisle wished to know, were British diplomats forbidden entry to British Embassy livings? By what right, de Lisle wished to know, had this great concourse of militia burst upon the privacy of extra-territorial persons?

  More cards were exchanged, more documents mutually examined; names and numbers mutually recorded. The detective was sorry, he said; these were troubled times, and he stared at Turner for a long time as if he recognised a colleague. Troubled times or not, de Lisle appeared to reply, the rights of diplomats must be respected. The greater the danger, the more necessary the immunity. They shook hands. Somebody saluted. Gradually they all withdrew. The green uniforms dispersed, the blue lights vanished, the vans drove away. De Lisle had found three glasses and was pouring a little whisky into each. The old man was whimpering. Turner had returned the buttons to their tin and put the tin in his pocket together with the little book on military gases.

  ‘Was that them?’ he demanded. ‘Were those the ones who questioned him?’

  ‘He says: like the detective, but a little older. Whiter, he says: a richer kind of man. I think we both know who he’s talking about. Here, you’d better look after this yourself.’

  Tugging the holster from the folds of his brown overcoat, de Lisle thrust it without pride into Turner’s waiting hand.

  The ferry was hung with the flags of the German Federation. The crest of Königswinter was nailed to the bridge. Militia packed the bow. Their steel helmets were square, their faces pale and sad. They were very quiet for such young men and their rubber boots made no sound on the steel deck, and they stared at the river as if they had been told to remember it. Turner stood apart from them, watching the crew cast away, and he perceived everything very clearly because he was tired and frightened and because it was still early morning: the heavy vibration of the iron deck as the cars thumped over the ramp and pressed forward to the best berth; the howl of the engines and the clatter of chains as the men shouted and cast away, the strident bell that put out the fading chimes of the town’s churches, the uniform hostility of the drivers as they rose from their cars and picked the change from their pigskin purses as if men were a secret society and could not acknowledge each other in public; and the pedestrians, the bronzed and the poor, coveting the cars from which they were kept apart. The river bank receded; the little town drew its spires back into the hills like scenery at the opera. Gradually they described their awkward course, steering a long arc with the current to avoid the sister ferry from the opposite bank. Now they slowed almost to a halt, drifting down river as the John F. Kennedy, loaded with equal pyramids of fine coal, bore swiftly down upon them, the children’s washing sloping in the wet air. Then they were rocking in its wake and the women passengers were calling in amusement.

  ‘He told you something else. About a woman. I heard him say Frau and Auto. Something about a woman and a car.’

  ‘Sorry, old boy,’ de Lisle said coolly, ‘it’s the Rhineland accent. Sometimes it simply defeats me.’

  Turner stared back at the Königswinter bank, shielding his eyes with his gloved hand because even in that miserable spring the light came sharply off the water. At last he saw what he was looking for: to each side, like mailed hands pointing to the Seven Hills of Siegfried, turreted brown villas built with the wealth of the Ruhr; between them a splash of white against the trees of the esplanade. It was Harting’s house receding in the mist.

  ‘I’m chasing a ghost,’ he muttered. ‘A bloody shadow.’

  ‘Your own,’ de Lisle retorted, his voice rich with disgust.

  ‘Oh, sure, sure.’

  ‘I shall drive you back to the Embassy,’ de Lisle continued. ‘From then on, you find your own transport.’

  ‘Why the hell did you bring me if you’re so squeamish?’ And suddenly he laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What a bloody fool I am! I’m going to sleep! You were frightened I might find the Green File and you thought you’d wait in the wings. Unsuitable for temporaries. Christ!’

  Cork had just heard the eight o’clock news. The German delegation had withdrawn from Brussels during the night. Officially the Federal Government wished to ‘reconsider certain technical problems which had arisen in the course of discussions’. Unofficially, as Cork put it, they had run away from school. Blankly he watched the coloured paper stutter out of the rollers and fall into the wire basket. It was about ten minutes before the summons came. There was a knock on the door and Miss Peate’s stupid head appeared at the little trap. Mr Bradfield would see him at once. Her mean eyes were alive with pleasure. Once and for all, she meant. As he followed her into the corridor, he caught sight of Cork’s brochure on plots of land in the Bahamas and he thought: that’s going to be useful by the time he’s done with me.

  12

  ‘And There was Leo. In the Second Class’

  ‘I have already spoken to Lumley. You go home tonight. Travel Section will attend to your tickets.’ Bradfield’s desk was piled high with telegrams. ‘And I have apologised in your name to Siebkron.’

  ‘Apologised?’

  Bradfield dropped the latch on the door. ‘Shall I spell it out for you? Like Harting, you are evidently something of a political primitive. You are here on a temporary diplomatic footing; if you were not, you would undoubtedly be in prison.’ He was pale with anger. ‘God alone knows what de Lisle thought he was up to. I shall speak to him separately. You have deliberately disobeyed my instruction; well, you people have your own code, I suppose, and I am as suspect as the next man.’

  ‘You flatter yourself.’

  ‘In this case, however, you were placed specifically under my authority, by Lumley, by the Ambassador and by the necessities of the situation here, and specifically ordered to make no move which could have repercussions outside the Embassy. Be quiet and listen to me! Instead of showing the minimal consideration that was asked of you, however, you go round to Harting’s house at five in the morning, frighten the wits out of his servant, wake the neighbours, bellow for de Lisle, and finally attract a full-scale police raid which, in a matter of hours, will no doubt be the talking point of the community. Not content with that, you are party to a stupid lie to the police about conducting an inventory; I imagine that will bring a smile even to Siebkron’s lips, after the description you offered him of your work last night.’

  ‘Any more?’

  ‘A great deal, thank you. Whatever Siebkron suspected that Harting had done, you have by now delivered the proof. You saw his attitude for yourself. Heaven knows what he does not think we are up to.’

  ‘Then tell him,’ Turner suggested. ‘Why not? Ease his mind. Christ, he knows more than we do. Why do we make a secret of something they all know? They’re in full cry. The worst we can do is spoil their kill.’

  ‘I will not have it said! Anything is better, any doubts, any suspicions on their part, than our admission at this moment in time that for twenty years a member of our diplomatic staff has been in Soviet employment. Is there nothing you will understand of this? I will not have it said! Let them think and do what they like, without our cooperation they can only surmise.’

  It was a statement of personal faith. He sat as still and as upright as a sentry guarding a national shrine.

  ‘Is that the lot?’

  ‘You people are supposed to work in secret. One calls upon you exp
ecting a standard of discretion. I could tell you a little about your behaviour here, had you not made it abundantly clear that manners mean nothing to you whatever. It will take a long time to sweep up the mess you have left behind you in this Embassy. You seem to think that nothing reaches me. I have already warded off Gaunt and Meadowes; no doubt there are others I shall have to soothe.’

  ‘I’d better go this afternoon,’ Turner suggested. He had not taken his eyes from Bradfield’s face. ‘I’ve ballsed it up, haven’t I? Sorry about that. Sorry you’re not satisfied with the service. I’ll write and apologise; that’s what Lumley likes me to do. A bread and butter letter. So I’ll do that. I’ll write.’ He sighed, ‘I seem to be a bit of a Jonah. Best thing to do really, chuck me out. Be a bit of a wrench for you, that will. You don’t like getting rid of people, do you? Rather give them a contract.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That you’ve a damn good reason for insisting on discretion! I said to Lumley – Christ, that was a joke – I asked him, see: does he want the files or the man? What the hell are you up to? Wait! One minute you give him a job, the next you don’t want to know him. If they brought his body in now you couldn’t care bloody less: you’d pat the pockets for papers and wish him luck!’

  He noticed, quite inconsequentially, Bradfield’s shoes. They were hand-made and polished that dark mahogany which is only captured by servants, or by those who have been brought up with them.

  ‘What the devil do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know who’s putting the finger on you: I don’t care. Siebkron, I would guess, from the way you crawl to him. Why did you bring us together last night if you were so bloody worried about offending him? What was the point to that, for one? Or did he order you to? Don’t answer yet, it’s my turn. You’re Harting’s guardian angel, do you realise that? It sticks out a mile, and I’ll write it six foot high when I get back to London. You renewed his contract, right? Just that, for a start. Although you despised him. But you didn’t just give him work; you made work for him. You knew bloody well the Foreign Office didn’t give a damn about the Destruction programme. Or for the Personalities Index either, I shouldn’t wonder. But you pretended; you built it up for him. Don’t tell me it was compassion for a man who didn’t belong.’