Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “We all were.”

  “But only about the Pole. You didn’t tell your troupe about this lot?”—eyes drifting lazily back to the table. “They don’t know about our—crock of gold?”

  “No. They only know about the boy. They must be raising hell by now.”

  “Don’t worry. Laura is feeding them buns and fizz. Did the Vopos search seriously for him, d’you think? Or was it a sham, the way Sasha said it would be?”

  “I don’t know. I tried not to look.”

  “No doggies?”

  “Yes, but they didn’t find him. We’d covered him with axle grease to put them off the scent.”

  “Edward’s idea?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Didn’t they provide you with a travel escort?”

  “Yes. But she was part of the scam.”

  “To plant the boy on us?”

  “According to Sasha, yes. Called herself Erna. Blond. Fights at about two hundred pounds.”

  Amory’s smile widens in fond recognition. “And are we still a pinko, or have we put away childish things?” Waiting for an answer that doesn’t come, Amory replaces the box of film on the table and smiles at it until it’s nicely in line with the rest of his crock of gold. “Where do we live?”

  “Hampstead.”

  “And we work full-time with the Brit. Coun.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty-four bus to Trafalgar Square?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got anyone? Wife, friend, whatnot?”

  “Wife. Pregnant.”

  “First name?”

  “Kate. Short for Catherine.”

  “With a C?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maiden name?”

  “Andrews.”

  “British subject?”

  “Yes. Schoolteacher.”

  “Born where?”

  “Doncaster.”

  “Know how long ago?”

  “Two years before me. April the fifteenth.”

  Why do I submit to this? Why don’t I tell Amory to mind his bloody business?

  “Well, bravo,” Amory remarks, still reviewing his find. “Very bravo, in case I forget to say it later. To the manner born, in fact. I’ll just stick this lot in the fridge if you don’t mind, then you can take me to your charges. I’m a Foreign Office flunky as far as they’re concerned, so don’t peach on me or I’ll be mortified.”

  The West Berlin police station, for all Mundy knows, is the very one where he was beaten up, but in his state of dazed anticlimax he hardly cares. Amory has phoned ahead to arrange things, Amory and his sergeant have perched themselves in Mundy’s place on the box next to Steve the driver and put Mundy in the seat behind them, and it is Amory, not Mundy, who orders the troupe to dismount in the windowless hangar where the bus has magically arrived. It is Amory again who with his sergeant’s help gathers the troupe in a circle round him while he addresses them with just the right mix of irreverence and warning.

  They’ve done a wonderful thing, he tells them. They’ve got every right to congratulate themselves.

  “But we have a secret. We have actually two secrets. One of them is on the top of the bus, because we don’t want his mum and dad and brothers and sisters back in Poland getting hurt. And the other one is Edward here, because if the British Council gets to hear what he’s stage-managed it will pop its bureaucratic garters and Edward will be out on his ear. Smuggling refugees is not supposed to be what the Council is about. So what we’re asking you to do is the hardest thing we can ask any actor to do, and that’s to keep your big mouths shut. Not just for tonight but forever and ever, amen.”

  And after the sergeant has read aloud an official declaration under the Official Secrets Act, and each one of them has separately signed an impressive form, Amory calls a jaunty Also los, bitte, meine Herren! across the hangar to a squad of policemen in dungarees who promptly lay their ladders against the British Leyland bus and swarm onto the roof, barking orders at each other until, with infinite circumspection, the backdrop is laid like a precious archaeological find on the concrete floor, and unrolled. An explosion of clapping breaks out as a naked tar baby rises like Adonis from the shreds of rag and kapok and, wild-eyed in his euphoria, rushes to his deliverers and embraces every one of them, Viola last and longest. After that, everything is suddenly very quick and matter-of-fact. The police put a blanket round him and whisk him away. Viola bustles after him. One wave from the door is all she is allowed. Standing on the platform of the bus, Amory has a final word for them.

  “Now the really bad news is—we’ve got to keep Edward here in Berlin for a day or two. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to say your goodbyes to him now, and leave him here to do the dirty work.”

  To hugs, howls and stage tears that turn to real tears, the psychedelic double-decker wheezes out of the hangar, leaving Pop to do the dirty work.

  Returning to Estelle Road four days later than either he or Kate had bargained for, Mundy slips easily into his role of indignant employee. It makes no difference that he’s already telephoned her on each one of those days with the same outraged message. He was incensed in Berlin, and he’s incensed now.

  “I mean why didn’t they think of it earlier?” he insists, not for the first time— they being as usual his luckless employers. “The sheer incompetence is what gets me down. Why does everything have to be so bloody hand to mouth?” he demands, and somewhat disloyally gives a scathing imitation of his good fairy in personnel. “‘Oh goody! Darling Ted Mundy’s in Berlin. How nice for him. Let’s give him a few days in our office there so he can meet all the boys and girls.’ Three bloody months, she’s known I was headed for Berlin. Then suddenly, bingo, it’s news to her.”

  Kate has put serious forethought into making his homecoming a success after five weeks of separation. She is waiting for him with the car when he arrives at London airport and she listens with a patient smile to his rant during the drive. But once in Estelle Road she puts her fingers over his lips and marches him straight upstairs to bed, pausing only to light a scented candle she has bought for the occasion. An hour later, they agree it’s time to eat and he shepherds her to the kitchen and insists on lifting the Burgundy beef out of the oven for her and generally getting in the way in his efforts to spare her needless exertion. His gestures, like his conversation, might strike her as a little theatrical but after so much exposure to theater people, what else should she expect?

  Over supper, with similar conscientiousness, he earnestly debriefs her about her pregnancy, her family, and the ructions inside the St. Pancras Labor Party. But as she obligingly chatters for him, he finds his eyes wandering furtively round the kitchen, treasuring each sacred detail as if he’s just come back from hospital: the tongue-and-groove pine dresser that, with a bit of help from her dad, he ran up to her specifications, because as Des likes to say, there’s a real carpenter in our Ted if he’d only put his mind to it; the nonstick saucepans that her brother, Reg, and his wife, Jenny, gave them as a wedding present; and the top-flight German washing machine and dryer that Kate bought out of her savings because she’s one of the old-fashioned ones, she says, and doesn’t mind admitting it: their baby’s going to have real nappies, not those blotting-paper jobs with the plastic rompers.

  And after leading her through every hour of the past five weeks, he goes round to her side of the table and kisses and caresses her until there’s nothing to be done but go upstairs again and make more love until, bit by bit, he ventures upon a censored version of his adventures with the kids, interrupting his narrative with gusts of hearty laughter to give himself the extra thinking time, and mimicking the voices of the main players till she swears she’ll be able to recognize Lexham anywhere.

  “And, thank God, I don’t have to go through it all again until June,” he ends with a careless sigh of relief.

  “Why? What’s in June?”

  “Oh, they want to give me Prague”—as if Prague is a bit of a downer.
/>   “Whatever for?”—her wry humor at it again—“Prague’s lovely.”

  “International dance festival. Minding the British entrants. Full subsistence, plus responsibility allowance.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten days, I’m afraid. Twelve if we count travel.”

  She goes quiet a moment, then gives her stomach a friendly pat. “Well, that’s all right, isn’t it? As long as he doesn’t decide to put in an early appearance.”

  “If she does, I’ll be here before her,” Mundy vows.

  Which is a game they play. She says it’s a boy, he says it’s a girl. Sometimes, to vary the joke, they change roles.

  7

  THE PSYCHEDELIC BUS has lumbered out of view, the troupe’s last tragic howls of farewell have merged into the din of traffic. Mundy and Amory are seated opposite each other in a soundproofed safe room across the corridor from Amory’s bare office, a tape recorder turns on the cork table between them. Even as we speak, says Amory, the crock of gold is winging its way to London. The analysts can’t wait to get their thieving hands on it. Meanwhile here’s what they want from us by yesterday, says Amory: a self-portrait warts and all of Edward; a blow-by-blow account of the Sasha-Mundy love affair from first blush to Weimar; and a description of the man who calls himself Professor Wolfgang, omitting no detail however slight.

  Dog tired and overstimulated at once, Mundy answers Amory’s questions brilliantly for an hour, then raggedly for another, before he starts to doze off for want of oxygen in the womb. Back in the reception room where he waits for Amory to dispose of the tape, he falls fast asleep, barely wakes for the short car journey to wherever Amory is taking him, and comes round to discover that he is shaved and showered and holding a whiskey and soda in his hand, and standing at the lace-curtained window of a pleasant flat overlooking the Kleistpark, with sturdy representatives of Berlin’s petit bourgeoisie, including many unawakened mothers with prams, strolling in the pleasant evening sunlight fifty feet below him. If he is an object of curiosity to Amory, he is a mystery to himself. The stress, the realization of what he has unleashed, and a bunch of accumulated anxieties that he has put aside till now, have left him drained and bewildered.

  “So maybe it’s time you called your Kate while I powder my nose,” Amory suggests, with the smile that never leaves his face.

  To which Mundy says, oh, well, yes, that’s what’s bothering him actually: Kate, and the problem of what exactly to tell her.

  “Not a problem at all,” Amory corrects him cheerfully. “Your conversation will be monitored by at least six intelligence services, so all you can do is play it down the middle.”

  “What middle?”

  “You’re being kept here by the British Council, reasons to follow. ‘Held up, darling—trouble at mill—my lords and masters are begging me to stay on till it’s sorted. Tschüss, Edward.’ She’s a professional girl. She’ll understand.”

  “Where am I staying?”

  “Here. Tell her it’s a bachelor officers’ hostel, that’ll put her mind at rest. Same number as on the phone. Don’t gild the lily too much and she’ll believe you.”

  And she does. While Amory powders his nose, Kate believes Mundy with a conviction that accuses him almost beyond bearing. Yet minutes later he’s back in Amory’s car swapping jokes with Cliff the sergeant at the wheel, and the next thing he knows he’s sitting in this new fish place in the Grunewald that a lot of people don’t know about yet, thank God, because Berlin’s so bloody incestuous these days. And over dinner, which they enjoy head to head in a timbered cubicle darkened for lovers and conveniently bombarded with live music and hubbub, Mundy again magically recovers his spirits—so much so that, when Amory playfully asks him whether, as a confirmed lefty, he regrets forsaking the sanctuary of Communist Europe for the decadence of the capitalist West, Mundy startles not just Amory but himself with a full-throated condemnation of Soviet communism and all its works.

  And perhaps he really feels all this, or perhaps he’s having a last shudder as he looks back with horror on his foolhardiness. Either way, Amory is not about to let the moment pass.

  “If you want it straight, Edward, you’re a born One of Us,” he says. “Onward and upward is the cry. So thanks and welcome aboard. Cheers.”

  And it is from there—Mundy is never afterwards sure why, but it seems at the time perfectly natural—that the conversation shifts to the strictly academic question of what a chap should or shouldn’t reasonably tell his wife in a situation like this, without anybody precisely identifying what situation they are referring to. And Amory’s point, which he offers tentatively but on the strength of a certain amount of experience, Edward, is that burdening people one loves with information they don’t need and can’t do anything about is as hurtful—and self-indulgent—as not telling them anything at all, and arguably more so. But that’s just Amory’s personal view, and Edward may feel differently.

  For example, if the person one is proposing to confide in is pregnant, Amory goes on lightly.

  Or if they’re naturally warmhearted and trusting, and haven’t got the checks and balances to keep something as big as this bottled up inside them.

  Or if they’re someone of high principle, say, who might have problems reconciling their political beliefs with—well, certain activities directed against a certain enemy or ideology which they don’t see in the same light as we do.

  In short if they’re Kate and have enough to worry about already, what with a school department to run, and a house to run, and a husband to take care of, and a first baby on the near horizon, and a bunch of Trotskyists to flush out of the St. Pancras Labor Party—because somewhere along the line, Mundy must have told Amory about them too.

  The Kleistpark flat is not Amory’s. And it’s not a bachelor officers’ hostel either. It’s a place he keeps for what he calls the odd chum who’s floating through town and doesn’t necessarily want to announce his presence. And anyway Amory needs to get back to the office for an hour in case anything new has come in from London.

  But Cliff here will be in the bedroom next to you if you need anything.

  And Cliff always knows how to find me.

  And if you’re thinking of an early walk, which you tell me you’re a devil for, I’m game. Meanwhile, get some sleep. And well done again.

  I’ll try.

  Mundy lies wide awake—as awake as last night in Weimar—counting off the quarters and halves of West Berlin’s oversynchronized clocks.

  Cut and run, he tells himself. You don’t need this stuff. You’ve got Kate, the baby, the job, the house. You’re not a Taos layabout anymore, you’ve cleared the pit. You’re Ted Mundy, cultural diplomat and father-to-be. Grab your bag, sneak downstairs without waking Cliff and hightail it to the airport.

  But while he gives himself this advice he remembers, and elsewhere in his head was remembering all along, that Nick Amory has his passport—only a formality, Edward, you’ll get it back in the morning.

  And he also knows that, in handing over the passport, he was entirely alive to the significance of what he was doing, and so was Amory.

  He was joining. A Born One of Us was signing up to His Own.

  He wasn’t submitting, he wasn’t being press-ganged. He was saying, “I’m in,” just as he was saying it over dinner when he was winging off about the awfulness of Communist life. He was offering himself as a playing member of Amory’s team because that was how he saw himself in the flush of his success, and how Amory saw him too.

  So just remind me, please, how I got into this mess in the first place. It wasn’t Amory who recruited me, it was Sasha. Amory didn’t dump a sackful of secrets in my lap and say, “Here, take this lot and give it to the British Secret Service.”

  Sasha did.

  So am I doing this for Mother England, or for a self-flagellating anti-Lutheran on the run from God?

  Answer: I’m not bloody well doing it at all. I’m jumping ship.

  All right, S
asha’s my friend. Not a friend I necessarily like, but a friend, a loyal one, and an old one, a friend who needs my protection. And, God knows, has had it. A friend who also happens to be a chaos addict, waging a fanatical one-man war against all forms of established order.

  And now he’s found himself another temple to pull down, so good luck to him. But he’s not pulling me down with it.

  Or Kate.

  Or the baby.

  Or the house. Or the job.

  And that’s what I’m going to be telling Amory in a couple of hours’ time when I take him up on that early walk he was talking about. “Nick,” I’ll be saying. “You’re a fine professional, I respect London, and yes, I totally agree, Soviet-style communism is a legitimate enemy and I wish you every success in your efforts to frustrate it. So if you’d kindly let me have my passport back and maybe rustle me up a car to the airport, you can make your own arrangements with Sasha and we’ll shake hands and call it a day.”

  But there is no early walk. There is Nick Amory hovering over him in the gray light of dawn, telling him to get dressed now.

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Home. The shortest route.”

  “Why?”

  “The analysts have given you an alpha double plus.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Best there is. Vital to national security. Your chum must have been hamstering the stuff for years. They’re asking whether you’d prefer a VC or a peerage.”

  To be conveyed.

  To take no decisions.

  To sit back and be a spectator to your own life. That’s spying too, apparently.

  Tempelhof airport, yet again, by early-morning Jeep, a different sergeant.

  Goodbye, Cliff.

  And goodbye to you, Ted, and good luck.

  The RAF plane waiting, propellers turning, Amory the only other passenger. Hold tight, we’re already taking off. The pilots don’t look at us. Trained not to. Land at Northolt airport, step out of the plane straight into a green van with extended wing mirrors and two blackened windows in the rear doors.