A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  ‘And from then on?’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes. From then on. Whenever we could.’

  ‘Did Bradfield know?’

  ‘Oh God. Know? Don’t know? You’re worse than the Germans. It was in between. You want things spelt out for you, don’t you? Some things can’t be. Some things aren’t true till they’re said. Rawley knows that better than anyone.’

  ‘Christ,’ Turner whispered. ‘You give yourself all the chances,’ and he remembered he had said the same thing to Bradfield three days ago.

  She stared ahead of her through the windscreen.

  ‘What are people worth? Children, husbands, careers. You go under and they call it sacrifice. You survive and they call you a bitch. Chop yourself in bits. For what? I’m not God. I can’t hold them all up on my shoulders. I live for them; they live for someone else. We’re all saints. We’re all fools. Why don’t we live for ourselves and call that service for a change?’

  ‘Did he know?’

  He had seized her arm.

  ‘Did he!’

  The tears trickled sideways over the bridge of her nose. She wiped them away.

  ‘Rawley’s a diplomat,’ she said at last. ‘The art of the possible, that’s Rawley. The limited aim, the trained mind. “Let’s not get overheated. Let’s not put a name to things. Let’s not negotiate without knowing what we want to achieve.” He can’t … he can’t go mad, it isn’t in him. He can’t live for anything. Except me.’

  ‘But he knew.’

  ‘I should think so,’ she said wearily. ‘I never asked him. Yes, he knew.’

  ‘Because you made him renew that contract, didn’t you. Last December. You worked on him.’

  ‘Yes. That was awful. That was quite awful. But it had to be done,’ she explained, as if she were referring to a higher cause of which they were both aware. ‘Or he’d have sent Leo away.’

  ‘And that was what Leo wanted. That’s why he picked you up.’

  ‘Rawley married me for my money. For what he could get out of me,’ she said. ‘He stayed with me for love. Does that satisfy you?’

  Turner did not reply.

  ‘He never put it into words. I told you. He never said the big things. “One more year is all I need. Just one year, Hazel. One year to love you, one year to get what they owe me. One year from December and then I’ll go. They don’t realise how much they need me.” So I invited him for drinks. When Rawley was there. It was early on, before the gossip started. We were just the three of us; I made Rawley come back early. “Rawley, this is Leo Harting, he works for you and he plays the organ in Chapel.” “Of course. We’ve met,” he said. We talked about nothing. Nuts from the Commissary. Spring leave. What it was like in Königswinter in the summer. “Mr Harting has asked us to dinner,” I said. “Isn’t he kind?” Next week we went to Königswinter. He gave us all the bits and pieces: ratafia biscuits with the sweet, halva with the coffee. That was all.’

  ‘What was all?’

  ‘Oh Christ, can’t you see? I’d shown him! I’d shown Rawley what I wanted him to buy me!’

  It was quite still now. The rooks had perched like sentinels on slowly rocking branches, and there was no wind any more to stir their feathers.

  ‘Are they like horses?’ she asked. ‘Do they sleep standing up?’

  She turned her head to look at him but he did not reply.

  ‘He hated silence,’ she said dreamily. ‘It frightened him. That’s why he liked music; that’s why he liked his house … it was full of noise. Not even the dead could have slept there. Let alone Leo.’

  She smiled remembering.

  ‘He didn’t live in it, he manned it. Like a ship. All night he’d be hopping up and down fixing a window or a shutter or something. His whole life was like that. Secret fears, secret memories; things he would never tell but expected you to know about.’ She yawned. ‘He won’t come now,’ she said. ‘He hated the dark too.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Turner said urgently. ‘What’s he doing?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Listen: he whispered to you. In the night he boasted, told you how he made the world turn for him. How clever he was, the tricks he played, the people he deceived!’

  ‘You’ve got him wrong. Utterly wrong.’

  ‘Then tell me!’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. We were pen friends, that’s all. He was reporting from another world.’

  ‘What world? Bloody Moscow and the fight for peace?’

  ‘I was right. You are vulgar. You want all the lines joined up and all the colours flat. You haven’t got the guts to face the half-tones.’

  ‘Has he?’

  She seemed to have put him out of her mind. ‘Let’s go, for God’s sake,’ she said shortly, as if Turner had been keeping her waiting.

  He had to push the car quite a distance along the track before it started. As they careered down the hill, he saw the Opel pull out from the lay-by and hurriedly take up its position thirty yards behind them. She drove to Remagen, to one of the big hotels along the waterfront run by an old lady who patted her arm as she sat down. Where was the little man? she asked, der nette kleine Herr who was always so jolly and smoked cigars and spoke such excellent German.

  ‘He talked it with an accent,’ she explained to Turner. ‘A slight English accent. It was something he’d taught himself.’

  The sun room was quite empty except for a young couple in the corner. The girl had long, blonde hair. They stared at him oddly because of the cuts on his face. From their window table Turner saw the Opel park in the esplanade below them. The number plate had changed but the moons were just the same. His head was aching terribly. He had not taken more than half his whisky before he wanted to vomit. He asked for water. The old lady brought a bottle of local health water and told him all about it. They had used it in both wars, she explained, when the hotel was a first-aid post for those who were wounded while trying to cross the river.

  ‘He was going to meet me here last Friday,’ she said. ‘And take me home to dinner. Rawley was leaving for Hanover. Leo cried off at the last minute.’

  ‘On the Thursday afternoon he was late. I didn’t bother. Sometimes he didn’t turn up at all. Sometimes he worked. It was different. Just the last month or so. He’d changed. I thought at first he’d got another woman. He was always slipping off to places –’

  ‘What places?’

  ‘Berlin once. Hamburg. Hanover. Stuttgart. Rather like Rawley. So he said anyway; I was never sure. He wasn’t strong on truth. Not your kind.’

  ‘He arrived late. Last Thursday. Come on!’

  ‘He’d had lunch with Praschko.’

  ‘At the Maternus,’ Turner breathed.

  ‘They’d had a discussion. That was another Leo-ism. It didn’t commit you. Like the Passive Voice, that was another favourite. A discussion had taken place. He didn’t say what about. He was preoccupied. Broody. I knew him better than to try and jerk him out of it so we just walked around. With them watching us. And I knew this was it.’

  ‘This was what?’

  ‘This was the year he’d wanted. He’d found it, whatever it was, and now he didn’t know what to do with it.’ She shrugged. ‘And by then, I’d found it too. He never realised. If he’d lifted a finger I’d have packed and gone with him.’ She was looking at the river. ‘Not children, husbands or any bloody thing would have stopped me. Not that he would have wanted me.’

  ‘What’s he found?’ Turner whispered.

  ‘I don’t know. He found it and he talked to Praschko and Praschko was no good. Leo knew he wouldn’t be any good; but he had to go back and find out. He had to make sure he was on his own.’

  ‘How do you know that? How much did he tell you?’

  ‘Less than he thought, perhaps. He assumed I was part of him and that was that.’ She shrugged. ‘I was a friend and friends don’t ask questions. Do they?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Rawley was going to Hanover, he said; Friday night R
awley would go to Hanover. So Leo would give me dinner at Königswinter. A special dinner. I said, “To celebrate?” “No. No, Hazel, not a celebration.” But everything was special now, he said, and there wasn’t much time any more. He wouldn’t be getting another contract. No more years after December. So why not have a good dinner once in a while? And he looked at me in a frightfully shifty way and we plodded round the course again, him leading. We’d meet in Remagen, he said; we’d meet here. And then: “I say, Hazel, what the devil is Rawley up to, look here, in Hanover? I mean, two days before the rally?” ’

  She had a ready-made face for Leo as well, a frown, a heavy German frown of exaggerated sincerity with which she surely teased him when they were together.

  ‘What was Rawley up to, then?’ Turner demanded.

  ‘Nothing as it turned out. He didn’t go. And Leo must have got wind of that, because he cried off.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘He rang up on Friday morning.’

  ‘What did he say? Exactly what did he say?’

  ‘Exactly, he said he couldn’t make it that night. He didn’t give a reason. Not a real one. He was awfully sorry; there was something he had to do. It had become urgent. It was his boardroom voice: “Awfully sorry, Hazel.” ’

  ‘That was all?’

  ‘I said all right.’ She was acting against tragedy. ‘And good luck.’ She shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard from him since. He disappeared and I was worried. I rang his house day and night. That’s why you came to dinner. I thought you might know something. You didn’t. Any fool could see that.’

  The blonde girl was standing up. She wore a long suit of fitted suede and she had to pull tightly at the crotch to straighten the sharp creases. The old lady was writing a bill. Turner called to her and asked for more water and she left the room to get it.

  ‘Ever seen this key?’

  Clumsily he drew it from the official buff envelope and laid it on the tablecloth before her. She picked it up and held it cautiously in her palm.

  ‘Where did you get this from?’

  ‘Königswinter. It was in a blue suit.’

  ‘The suit he wore on Thursday,’ she said examining it.

  ‘It’s one you gave him, is it?’ he asked with unconcealed distaste. ‘Your house-key?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the one I wouldn’t give him,’ she replied at last. ‘That was the only thing I wouldn’t do for him.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I suppose that’s what he wanted from Pargiter. That bitch Mary Crabbe told me he’d had a fling with her.’ She stared down at the esplanade, at the waiting Opel parked in the shadow between the lights; then across the river to Leo’s side.

  ‘He said the Embassy had got something that belonged to him. Something from long ago. “They owe me, Hazel.” He wouldn’t say what it was. Memories, he said. It was to do with long ago, and I could get him the key so that he could take it back. I told him: “Talk to them. Tell Rawley, he’s human.” He said, No, Rawley was the last person on earth he could talk to. It wasn’t anything valuable. It was locked away and they didn’t even know they had it. You’re going to interrupt. Don’t. Just listen. I’m telling you more than you deserve.’

  She drank some whisky.

  ‘About the third time … in our house. He lay in bed and just went on about it: “Nothing bad,” he said, “nothing political, but something owed.” If he was Duty Officer it wouldn’t matter, but he wasn’t allowed to do Duty, being what he was. There was one key, they’d never miss it, no one knew how many there were anyway. One key he must have.’ She broke off. ‘Rawley fascinated him. He loved his dressing-room. All the trappings of a gent. He loved to see. Sometimes that’s what I was to him: Rawley’s wife. The cuff links, the Edward Lear … He wanted to know all the backstairs things like who cleaned his shoes, where he had his suits made. That was when he played his card: while he was dressing. He pretended to remember what he’d been talking about all night. “I say, Hazel, look here. You could get me the key. When Rawley’s working late one night, couldn’t you? I mean, call on him, say you’d left something in the Assembly Room. It would be frightfully simple. It’s a different key,” he said. “It’s not like the others. Very easily recognised, Hazel.” That key,’ she remarked flatly handing it back to him. ‘ “You’re clever,” I said. “You’ll find a way.” ’

  ‘That was before Christmas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a bloody fool I am,’ Turner whispered. ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Why? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ His eyes were bright with success. ‘Just for a moment, I forgot he was a thief, that’s all. I thought he’d copy that key, and he just stole it. Of course he would!’

  ‘He’s not a thief! He’s a man. He’s ten times the man you are.’

  ‘Oh sure, sure. You were big scale you two. I’ve heard all that crap, believe me. You lived in the big unspoken part of life, didn’t you? You were the artists, and Rawley was the poor bloody technician. You had souls, you two, you heard voices; Rawley just picked up the bits because he loved you. And all the time I thought they were sniggering about Jenny Pargiter. Christ Almighty! Poor sod,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Poor bastard. I’ll never like Bradfield, that’s for sure; but Christ, he has my full sympathy.’

  Leaving some money on the table he followed her down the stone steps. She was frightened.

  ‘He never mentioned Margaret Aickman to you, I suppose? He was going to marry her, you know. She was the only woman he loved.’

  ‘He never loved anyone but me.’

  ‘But he didn’t mention her? He did to other people, you see. Everyone except you. She was his big love!’

  ‘I don’t believe it, I’ll never believe it!’

  He pulled open the car door and leaned in after her. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve touched the hem. He loved you. The whole bloody world can go to war as long as you have your little boy!’

  ‘Yes. I’ve touched the hem. He was real with me. I made him real. He’s real whatever he’s doing now. That was our time, and I’m not going to let you destroy it: you or anyone else. He found me.’

  ‘What else did he find?’

  Miraculously, the car started.

  ‘He found me, and whatever he found down there was the other part of coming alive.’

  ‘Down? Down where? Where did he go? Tell me! You know! What was it he said to you?’

  She drove away, not looking back, quite slowly, up the esplanade into the evening and the small lights.

  The Opel drew out, preparing to follow her. Turner let it pass, then ran across the road and jumped into a taxi.

  The Embassy car park was full, the guard was doubled at the gate. Once more, the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce waited at the door like an ancient ship to bear him to the storm. As Turner ran up the steps, his raincoat flying behind him, he held the key ready in his hand.

  15

  The Glory Hole

  Two Queen’s messengers stood at the desk, their black leather pouches hung like parachute harnesses over their regimental blazers.

  ‘Who’s Duty Officer?’ Turner snapped.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ said Gaunt. ‘Seven o’clock yesterday, that’s what –’

  There was a creak of leather as the messengers hastily made room for him.

  ‘I want the keys.’

  Gaunt saw the cuts on Turner’s face and his eyes opened wide.

  ‘Ring the Duty Officer.’ Turner picked up the receiver and offered it to him across the desk. ‘Tell him to come down with the keys. Now!’

  Gaunt was protesting. The lobby swung a little and held still. Turner heard his silly Welsh bleat, half complaining, half flattering, and he grasped him roughly by the arm and pulled him into the dark corridor.

  ‘If you don’t do as I say, I’ll see they post the hell out of you for the rest of your natural life.’

  ‘The keys aren’t drawn, I tell you.’

  �
�Where are they?’

  ‘I’ve got them here. In the safe. But you can’t have them, not without a signature, you know that very well!’

  ‘I don’t want them. I want you to count them, that’s all. Count the bloody keys!’

  The messengers, ostentatiously discreet, were talking to one another in awkward undertones, but Turner’s voice cut through them like an axe: ‘How many should there be?’

  ‘Forty-seven.’

  Summoning the younger guard, Gaunt unlocked the safe that was built into the corner and drew out the familiar bunch of bright-cut brass keys. Overcome by curiosity, the two messengers watched while the square, miner’s fingers told off each key like a bead on the abacus. He counted them once and he counted them a second time, and he handed them to the boy who counted them again.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Forty-six,’ said Gaunt grudgingly. ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Forty-six,’ the boy echoed. ‘One short.’

  ‘When were they last counted?’

  ‘ ’Tisn’t hardly possible to say,’ Gaunt muttered. ‘They’ve been going in and out for weeks.’

  Turner pointed to the shining new grille that cut off the basement stairway.

  ‘How do I get down there?’

  ‘I told you. Bradfield has the key. It’s a riot gate, see. Guards don’t have the authority.’

  ‘How do the cleaners get down there then? What about the boilermen?’

  ‘The boiler-room’s separate access, now, ever since Bremen, see. They’ve put grilles down there as well. They can use the outside stairs but they can’t go no further than the boiler on account of being prevented.’ Gaunt was very scared.

  ‘There’s a fire escape … a service lift.’

  ‘Only the back staircase, but that’s locked too, see. Locked.’

  ‘And the keys?’

  ‘With Bradfield. Same as for the lift.’

  ‘Where does it lead from?’

  ‘Top floor.’

  ‘Up by your place?’

  ‘What of it then?’

  ‘Up by your place or not?’

  ‘Near.’

  ‘Show me!’

  Gaunt looked down, looked at the boy, looked at Turner and then back at the boy again. Reluctantly he dropped the keys into the boy’s hand and without a word to the messengers led Turner quickly upstairs.