Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  “May I call you Ted, please? Some Brits, they are so formal!”

  “Not this one, I assure you, Richard!” He has placed Richard’s accent too: Scandinavian declamatory, every sentence a complaint.

  “Ted. It is Mr. Dimitri’s policy to pay an appearance fee to all his potential employees, whether or not the interview has a successful outcome. The fee is one thousand dollars cash, payable on signature of a contract of service for one day. Is this acceptable to you, Ted?”

  Confused as always when he is offered money, Mundy lets out one of his embarrassed barks and shoves his wrist against his mouth. “I suppose I might force myself,” he concedes. And barks again.

  “The contract is short, Ted. The key element here is confidentiality,” says Richard, who has clearly learned his lines to perfection. “Under its terms, you are forbidden to disclose the content of your discussion with Mr. Dimitri and his staff. That means also the fact that such discussions took place at all. Okay? You can go along with this condition? Take a good look, please. Don’t sign till you have read. In life, we say, this is an axiom.”

  Do we really? Well, well. In life, no less. Plain, high-quality paper, no address, the date. Three paragraphs of electronic type. Something called the New Planet Foundation is about to own Ted Mundy for a day. In exchange Mundy will undertake not to talk, write, or by any means describe, relate, impart, disclose or otherwise divulge—and any other stupid verb that lawyers who are always arseholes can think of to turn an honest sentiment into an unintelligible piece of junk—whatever may or may not have passed between them in the ogre’s castle.

  Mundy signs, they shake hands again. Richard’s is dry and hard. When he has shaken Mundy’s hand for long enough, he reaches inside his blazer and produces a yellow envelope, sealed. Not from a drawer, note well, not from a safe, not from a cash box but from his pocket, next to his heart. And he doesn’t even want a receipt for it.

  Richard opens the door, they shake hands once more for the cameras, except that, as far as Mundy knows, there aren’t any. Two more anoraks are waiting in the corridor. White faces, black anoraks, dead faces. Offcuts of the Mormon guards.

  “Sir, Mr. Dimitri will see you now,” says one of them.

  Two blazers guard a pair of richly carved doors, but these blazers, unlike Richard’s, are green. Somebody’s really thought about wardrobe, Mundy thinks. One pats him down while the other fills a shallow basket with the prisoner’s embarrassing possessions: a battered pewter hip flask, a velcro Union Jack, a dog-eared copy of the Süddeutsche, a mildewed cellphone, a pocketful of collection money in assorted currencies taken at the Linderhof departure door, a bunch of keys to his apartment, a thousand-dollar envelope.

  The carved doors fly open, Mundy steps forward and waits for his first sight of the billionaire philosopher, philanthropist, recluse and genius who has pledged his life and fortune to Sasha and the Arms Race for Truth. But all he sees is a roly-poly fellow in a baggy tracksuit and trainers, wading down the room at him while two men in suits look on from the sidelines.

  “Mr. Mundy, sir, I have had it said to me that your views on recent events in the world coincide remarkably with Sasha’s and my own.” If Mundy is expected to answer, he needn’t worry: Dimitri gives him no time. He has grabbed him by the left biceps and is wheeling him from point to point around the room.

  “This is Sven, this is Angelo,” he declares, dismissing the suits rather than introducing them. “They pick the flyshit out of the pepper for me. Detail bores me these days, Mr. Mundy. Like Sasha I’m a man of the broad brush. That war on Iraq was illegitimate, Mr. Mundy. It was a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with Al Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity between Saddam and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.”

  Mundy again wonders whether he is supposed to add anything to this, and again Dimitri relieves him of the choice. His voice is as violent as his gestures: a rasping, pounding mongrel of a voice even in repose. In Mundy’s imagination it is sired in the Levant, trained in the Balkans and finished off in the Bronx. Or so he tells himself as he strives to keep his mental distance from it—now Greek, now Arab, now American-Jewish, now all of them thrown together in a pilfered, semiliterate English cocktail that has never mixed. Does Dimitri have a mother tongue? Mundy doubts it. There is a fellow orphan in Dimitri, Mundy can feel it: a docklands kid, a knife child, an inventor of his own rules.

  “All it takes for a war like that to start, Sasha tells me, is for a few good men to do nothing. Well, they did nothing. Whether they’re good men, that’s another thing. The Democratic opposition did fuck-all. Stay home, sing patriotic songs till it’s safe to come out, was their policy. Jesus Christ, what kind of opposition is that? What kind of moral courage? Do I go too fast for you, Mr. Mundy? People tell me I give them no time to think. You want time to think?”

  “Oh, I can manage, thanks.”

  “I believe you can. You have an intelligent head, a good eye, I like you. Iran is next in line, Syria, Korea, take your pick. Forgive me, I am failing as a host. I was forgetting the vital role played by your British prime minister, without whom there might have been no war.” A quick turn as they pursue their Palais Glide. “Mr. Mundy will take tea, Angelo. He’s married to a Turk, he should drink apple tea or coffee, but he takes a strong Indian tea with cow’s milk in it and a bowl of brown cane sugar on the side. The Turks had an honorable role in this war, Mr. Mundy. You should be proud of your lady, as you surely are.”

  “Thank you.”

  Turn again.

  “My pleasure. Turkey’s Islamist government refused to assist the American aggressor, and their military for once restrained their customary impulse to beat the shit out of the Kurds.” A half step, and thank God we’re moving towards the sofa because Mundy’s head is swimming, he has the sensation of taking part in three conversations at once, yet he’s scarcely uttered a word. “A man has to inform himself, Mr. Mundy. And I do that, as you will notice. The world is knee-deep in lies. Time the lambs ate the lion. Sit down, please, sir. Here on my right side. I have a bad left ear. Some arsehole put a meat hook in it a while back, and all it gives me is the sound of the sea. Well, I don’t like the fucking sea. I sailed it seven years, then I bought the ship and went ashore and bought some more ships, and I never went to sea again.”

  In sideways glances, Mundy has managed to assemble an image of his host to go with the voice. He is seventy if a day. He has a wide, rolling body and a bald, liver-spotted head with crisscross lines on it and deep creases between the cushions of his face. He has a child’s sweet blue eyes, very liquid, and the quicker he talks the quicker they move. Mustafa has a windup toy that does the same and perhaps that’s why Mundy is finding it hard to take Dimitri seriously. He has the feeling of sitting too close to the stage, and seeing the cracks in Dimitri’s makeup, and the pins in his wig, and the wires when he spreads his wings.

  Angelo has brought Mundy’s tea, and for Dimitri a glass of soy milk. Mundy and Dimitri are turned sidesaddle to one another on the long sofa, like a television host and his guest. Sven roosts on a tall-backed leather chair outside their line of sight. On his lap he clutches a notebook to take minutes. The notebook is brand-new. The pen is a streamlined black-and-gold affair, pride of the executive classes. Like Angelo, who prefers the fringes, Sven is gaunt and severe. Dimitri likes men about him who are thin.

  “So who are you, Mr. Mundy?” Dimitri demands.

  He is leaning back in the cushions, his stubby hands linked over his stomach. His sneakers are turned inward to avoid giving unintentional offense. Perhaps, like Mundy, he has learned his manners in the East. “You’re a Pakistani-English-born gentleman who played student anarchist in Berlin,” he is intoning. “You’re a lover of the German so
ul who sold Shakespeare for the Queen and you’re shacked up with a Turkish Muslim. So who the fuck are you?—Bakunin, Gandhi, King Richard or Saladin?”

  “Ted Mundy, tour guide,” Mundy replies, and laughs. Dimitri laughs with him, and claps him on the shoulder then kneads it, which Mundy could do without, but never mind, they’re such good pals.

  “Every war is worse than the last one, Mr. Mundy. But this war is the worst I ever saw if we’re talking about lies, which I am. Lies happen to be something of a speciality of mine. Maybe because I told so many in my time, they piss me off. Makes no difference the Cold War’s over. Makes no difference we’re globalized, multinational or what the hell. Soon as the tom-toms sound and the politicians roll out their lies, it’s bows and arrows and the flag and round-the-clock television for all loyal citizens. It’s three cheers for the big bangs and who gives a fuck about casualties as long as they’re the other guy’s?”

  He seems not to need to breathe between sentences.

  “And don’t give me that horseshit about Old Europe,” he warns, though Mundy has not opened his mouth. “We’re looking at the oldest America in the book. Puritan zealots butchering savages in the name of the Lord—how do you get older than that? It was genocide then, it’s genocide today, but whoever owns the truth owns the game.”

  Mundy considers speaking up for the largest antiwar demonstrations the world has ever seen, but it is clear by now that interrupting Dimitri is not part of the interview. Dimitri’s voice, whatever his peaceful intentions, rules by force. It neither rises nor falls. It could advise you of the Second Coming or the imminent extinction of the human race, and you would question it at your peril.

  “March, you get sore feet. Protest, you get a bad throat and a policeman’s boot in your teeth. Anybody who nails the lies is a radical malcontent. Or he’s an Islamist anti-Semite. Or he’s both. And if you’re worried about the future, please don’t be, because there’s a new war just around the corner, and you won’t have to bother about a thing, just switch on the TV and enjoy another virtual war brought to your screens courtesy of your favorite feel-good junta and its corporate parasites.” There is no pause, but one thick hand opens and offers the question: “So what the fuck do we do, Mr. Mundy? How do we make it impossible for your country, or America, or any damn country, to take the world to war on the strength of a bunch of cooked-up lies that in the cold light of day look about as plausible as the pixies in your fucking garden? How do we get to protect your children and my grandchildren from being suckered into war? I am speaking, Mr. Mundy, of the corporate state and its monopoly of information. I am speaking of its armlock on the objective truth. And I am wondering how the fuck we turn back the tide. Would you be at all interested in that? Of course you would”—answering before Mundy can—“and so would I. And so would every sane citizen of the world. I ask you again: What the fuck do we do to bring sanity and reason back into the political arena, if it was ever there in the first place?”

  Mundy is whisked fleetingly to the Republican Club, where similar discussions raged nightly, and with similar epithets. Now, as then, no easy answer springs to mind. But that is not entirely because he is bereft of words. It is more because he feels he has landed in the middle of a play where everybody knows the plot except himself.

  “Do we need a new electorate? The fuck we do. It’s not the people’s fault they can’t see straight. Nobody gives them a chance. ‘Look this way, don’t look that way. Look that way, and you’re an uncitizen, an antipatriot, a schmuck.’ Do we need new politicians? Sure we do, but it’s the electorate that has to find them. You and me, we can’t do that. And how the hell can the electorate do its job when the politicians refuse to step up to the discussion? The electorate is screwed before it gets into the polling booths. If it ever does.”

  For a moment Dimitri allows it to seem that he is as short of solutions as Mundy is. But it is quickly apparent he is only making a dramatic pause before ascending to a higher plane. In theater, we call it a beat. To herald it, Dimitri has pointed a stubby finger at Mundy’s face, and is looking straight down its sights into Mundy’s eyes.

  “I am speaking, Mr. Mundy—I am speaking of something even more important to the development of Western society than the ballot box. I am speaking of the deliberate corruption of young minds at their most formative stage. Of the lies that are forced on them from the cradle onwards by corporate or state manipulation, if there’s a difference anymore between the two, which I begin to doubt. I am speaking of the encroachment of corporate power on every university campus in the first, second and third worlds. I am speaking of educational colonization by means of corporate investment at faculty level, conditional upon the observation of untrue nostrums that are advantageous to the corporate investor, and deleterious for the poor fuck of a student.”

  You’re great, Mundy wants to tell him. You get the part. Now put your finger back in its holster.

  “I am speaking of the deliberate curtailment of free thought in our society, Mr. Mundy, and how we may address it. I am an urchin, Mr. Mundy. Born one, stayed one. My intellectual processes are untutored. Scholars would laugh at me. Nevertheless I have acquired many books on this subject.” So Sasha said, Mundy is thinking. “I have in mind such thinkers as the Canadian Naomi Klein, India’s Arundhati Roy, who pleads for a different way of seeing, your British George Monbiot and Mark Curtis, Australia’s John Pilger, America’s Noam Chomsky, the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and the Franco-American Susan George of World Social Forum at Porto Alegre. You have read all of these fine writers, Mr. Mundy?”

  “Nearly all.” And nearly all Adorno, nearly all Horkheimer and nearly all Marcuse, Mundy thinks, recalling a similar interrogation in Berlin a few lifetimes ago. I love them all, but I can’t remember a word any of them said.

  “From their varying perspectives, each of these eminent writers tells me the same story. The corporate octopus is stifling the natural growth of humanity. It spreads tyranny, poverty and economic serfdom. It defies the simplest laws of ecology. Warfare is the extension of corporate power by other means. Each thrives off the other and the recent war proves the point in spades. Does this urgent message cut any ice with you, Mr. Mundy, or am I conducting a dialogue with myself?”

  “It rings a lot of bells, actually,” Mundy politely assures him.

  Dimitri is evidently approaching the summit of his oration, as he has no doubt approached it many times before. His face darkens, his voice lifts, as he leans confidingly towards his audience.

  “How do these corporations achieve their stranglehold on our society? When they’re not shooting, they’re buying. They buy good minds, and tie them to their wagon wheels. They buy students wet from their mothers, and castrate their thought processes. They create false orthodoxies and impose censorship under the sham of political correctness. They build university facilities, dictate university courses, overpromote the professors who kiss ass, and they bully the shit out of heretics. Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion on a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome. And their product is the zero-educated robot known otherwise as the corporate executive.”

  He has reached the summit and is starting down the hill.

  “Mr. Mundy, twenty years from now there will not be a place of learning in the Western Hemisphere that hasn’t sold its soul to corporate bigotry. There will be only one permitted opinion in every subject from the Garden of Eden to pink stripes in toothpaste. There won’t be a contrary voice that’s worth a whore’s embrace unless somebody turns the river round and gets it flowing in the opposite direction. Well, I am one of those somebodies, and so is Sasha, and I am inviting you to be another.”

  The mention of Sasha rouses Mundy from his trance. Where on earth is he? Is he still working on that print of Tyrolean peasants, or has he graduated to postmodern architecture? Dimitri has taken to the floor. Other men of power, when describing their plan to redesign mankind, might fl
ing their arms about, but Dimitri is a master of the economic gesture. His walk is measured, hands clasped behind his dock laborer’s back. Only occasionally does he release an arm to make the short, emphatic point.

  The purpose of his great plan is to create corporation-free academic zones.

  It is to foster seminaries of unbought opinion, Mr. Mundy, open to students of any age, nationality and discipline who are interested in reinventing human incentive in the twenty-first century.

  It is to establish nothing less than a rational marketplace of free opinion, where the true causes of war, and the means of preventing it, can be aired.

  And finally his plan acquires a name—not several names, like its author, but one resounding name to echo down the ages: the Counter-University, no less, a global venture, Mr. Mundy, as multinational and elusive as the corporations it seeks to counter, untainted by vested, religious, state or corporate interest, and financed by Dimitri’s own immense, larcenous resources.

  “The Counter-University has no dogma,” he declares, swinging round on one heel to address Mundy down the room. “We offer no doctrinal front for our corporate adversaries to piss on. Like them, we shall be offshore and responsible to nobody. We shall use stealth. We shall be intellectual guerrillas. We shall install ourselves wherever the enemy is encamped, and subvert him from within. Think your own fine University of Oxford. Imagine a student of science. He walks out of the bio lab. He comes a couple of hundred yards down the road. It’s been a long day. He sees our sign, THE COUNTER-UNIVERSITY. He’s had his head up some corporate test tube all day. He walks in, sits down, listens. ‘They’re inviting me, as an individual, to live up to my duties as a responsible citizen of an endangered globe? What the fuck’s happening to me?’ he says to himself in perplexity. ‘These guys are off the wall. This is not what my corporation sponsors me for. I’m not paid to have a conscience, I’m paid to find new ways to fuck up the planet.’ Then he listens a little longer, and he begins to get the idea. ‘Hey. I’m somebody after all. Maybe I don’t have to prove what a big guy I am by fucking up the planet. Maybe I should reconsider my relationship with it, love it even.’ Know what he does then? He takes our card. And he goes home. And he visits a certain website we have discreetly recommended to him. This website will further awaken the sense of discovery in him. Soon he will see himself as a pioneer of disrespectful thinking. He will have a dozen such websites, each one of them a stepping-stone to spiritual freedom. Websites for our Counter-University. Websites for our Counter-Libraries. Websites for scurrilous but informed debate among our ever-growing army of renegades.”