Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  ‘As far as Shannon is concerned, Trump is devil’s advocate for every tinpot demagogue and kleptocrat across the globe,’ I declare in my best offhand voice. ‘Trump the man is a total nothing in Shannon’s view. A mob orator. But as a symptom of what’s out there in the world’s undergrowth, waiting to be stirred up, he’s the devil incarnate. A simplistic view, you may say, not everyone’s by any means. But deeply felt all the same. Particularly if you’re by way of being an obsessive pro-European. Which Shannon is,’ I add firmly, lest I have not made the distinction between us sufficiently clear.

  I give a reminiscent laugh that chimes quaintly in the silence of the room. I choose Ghita. She’s the safest.

  ‘You’ll never believe this, Ghita, but Shannon actually said to me one evening that it was a crying shame that all American assassins seem to come from the far right. High time the left got itself a shooter!’

  Can the silence get any deeper? This one can.

  ‘And you went along with that?’ Ghita enquires for all the room.

  ‘Humorously, casually, over a beer, in the sense that I didn’t contradict him, inferentially, as one does, I agreed that the world would be a damned sight better off if Trump wasn’t in it. I’m not even sure he said assassinated. Maybe topped or offed.’

  I hadn’t noticed the bottled water beside me. Now I do. The Office does tap water as a matter of principle. If it’s bottled it has come down from the top floor. I pour myself a glass, take a good swallow, and appeal to Guy Brammel as the last reasonable man standing.

  ‘Guy, for fuck’s sake.’

  He doesn’t hear me. He is deep in his iPad. At last he raises his head:

  ‘All right, everybody. Orders from on high. Nat, you go home to Battersea now and stay there. Expect a call six p.m. this evening as ever is. Until then, you’re gated. Ghita, you take over the Haven with immediate effect: agents, ops, the team, the whole mess. The Haven as of now no longer in the maw of London General but assimilated on a pro tem basis into Russia department. Signed Bryn Jordan, head down in Washington, poor bastard. Anyone got anything else on their minds – nobody? Then let’s get back to work.’

  They troop out. Last to leave is Percy Price, who hasn’t breathed one word in four hours.

  ‘Funny friends you’ve got then,’ he remarks without a glance.

  *

  There’s a greasy spoon café just up the road from our house. It serves breakfast from five in the morning. And I can’t tell you today, any more than I could have told you at the time, what thoughts were washing through my head as I sat drinking coffee after coffee and listening mindlessly to the workmen’s chatter which, being in Hungarian, was as incomprehensible to me as my own feelings. It was gone six a.m. when I paid my bill and stole into the house by the back door, then up the stairs, and into bed beside the sleeping Prue.

  17

  I ask myself from time to time how that Saturday would have unfolded if Prue and I hadn’t had a longstanding lunch date with Larry and Amy in Great Missenden. Prue and Amy had been at school together and friends ever since. Larry was a worthy family lawyer a bit older than me, loved his golf and his dog. The couple had no children to their regret and were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary. It was to be just the four of us at lunch, and a walk in the Chilterns afterwards. Prue had bought them a quilted Victorian bedspread and got it all wrapped and ready, and some sort of comic chew for their boxer dog. What with the seemingly eternal heatwave and the Saturday traffic, we’d reckoned two hours, so leave at eleven latest.

  At ten I was still in bed asleep, so Prue sweetly brought me up a cup of tea. I’d no idea how long she’d been up and about since she’d dressed without waking me. But, knowing her, she’d put in a couple of hours at her desk grappling with Big Pharma. It was therefore all the more gratifying that she had interrupted her labours. I am being pompous with a reason. The ensuing conversation between us begins predictably enough with a ‘whatever hour did you get in last night, Nat?’ to which I reply, God knows, Prue, just bloody late, or whatever. But something in my voice or face gets through to her. Moreover, as I now know, the divergence of our supposedly parallel lives since my homecoming has begun to tell on her. She has a fear, only later confided to me, that her war on Big Pharma, and mine on whatever target the Office in its wisdom has assigned to me, far from complementing each other, are pitching us into opposing camps. And it is this anxiety coupled with my physical appearance that triggers our seemingly humble but momentous exchange.

  ‘We are going, aren’t we, Nat?’ she asks me, with what I continue to regard as unnerving intuition.

  ‘Going where?’ I reply evasively, though I know perfectly well.

  ‘To Larry and Amy’s. For their twenty-fifth. Where else?’

  ‘Well, not both of us actually, Prue, I’m afraid. I can’t. You’ll have to go alone. Or why not try Phoebe? She’d go with you like a shot.’

  Phoebe, our next-door neighbour, not necessarily the brightest of company but perhaps better than an empty seat.

  ‘Nat, are you ill?’ Prue asks.

  ‘Not to my knowledge. I’m on standby,’ I reply as stoutly as I can.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the Office.’

  ‘Can’t you be on standby and still come?’

  ‘No. I’ve got to be here. Physically. In the house.’

  ‘Why? What’s happening in the house?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You can’t be waiting for nothing. Are you in some sort of danger?’

  ‘It’s not like that. Larry and Amy know I’m a spook. Look, I’ll ring him,’ I suggest gallantly. ‘Larry won’t ask questions’ – with the tacit subtext: unlike you.

  ‘How about theatre tonight? We’ve got two tickets for Simon Russell Beale, if you remember. Stalls.’

  ‘I can’t do that either.’

  ‘Because you’ll be on standby.’

  ‘I’m getting a call at six. It’s anyone’s guess what happens after that.’

  ‘So we’re waiting all day for a call at six.’

  ‘I guess so. Well I am, anyway,’ I say.

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I can’t leave the house. Bryn’s orders. I’m gated.’

  ‘Bryn’s?’

  ‘Himself. Direct from Washington.’

  ‘Then I think it’s better if I ring Amy,’ she says, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Perhaps they’d like the tickets too. I’ll call her from the kitchen.’

  At which juncture Prue does what Prue always does, just when I think she has finally run out of patience with me: steps back, takes a second reading of the situation and sets about fixing it. By the time she comes back, she has changed into an old pair of jeans and the silly Edelweiss jacket we bought on our skiing holiday, and she’s smiling.

  ‘Did you sleep?’ she asks, making me budge over, then sitting down on the bed.

  ‘Not a lot.’

  She feels my brow, testing it for heat.

  ‘I’m really not ill, Prue,’ I repeat.

  ‘No. But I am wondering whether by any chance the Office has chucked you out,’ she says, contriving to make the question more a confession of her own concerns than mine.

  ‘Well, pretty much, yes. I think it probably has,’ I concede.

  ‘Unfairly?’

  ‘No. Not really, no.’

  ‘Did you fuck up, or did they?’

  ‘Bit of both really. I just got mixed up with the wrong people.’

  ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re not coming to get you in some way?’

  ‘No. It’s not like that,’ I assure her, realizing as I say this that I am not quite as much in command of myself as I had thought.

  ‘What’s happened to your Office mobile? You always keep it by the bed.’

  ‘Must be in my suit,’ I say, still in some kind of deceptive mode.

  ‘It’s not. I looked. Has the Office confiscated it?’


  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As of when?’

  ‘Last night. This morning. It was an all-night session.’

  ‘Are you angry with them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.’

  ‘Then stay in bed and find out. The call you’re expecting at six p.m. will presumably be on the house line.’

  ‘It will have to be, yes.’

  ‘I’ll email Steff and make sure she doesn’t plan to Skype at the same time. You’ll need all your concentration.’ Then reaching the door she changes her mind, turns round and resumes her place on the bed. ‘Can I say something, Nat? Non-invasive? Just a small mission statement?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  She has taken my hand back, this time not to feel my pulse.

  ‘If the Office is buggering you about,’ she says very firmly, ‘and if you’re determined to hang in there nonetheless, you have my unstinted support till death do us part, and fuck boys’ clubs. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘You do. Thank you.’

  ‘Equally, if the Office is buggering you about, and you decide on the spur of the moment to tell them to shove it up their arses and to hell with your pension, we’re solvent and we can make do.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘And you can tell that to Bryn too, if it’s any help,’ she adds just as firmly. ‘Or I will.’

  ‘Safer not,’ I say – followed by unforced laughter and relief on both sides.

  Mutual expressions of love are seldom impressive to anyone not taking part in them, but the things we said to each other that day – notably Prue to me – ring in my memory like a rallying call. It was as if, in one shove, she had pushed open an invisible door between us. And I like to think that it was by way of this same door that I first started to make vague sense of the scatterbrained theories and bits of half-baked intuition regarding Ed’s incomprehensible behaviour that kept springing up at me like fireworks and fizzling out.

  *

  ‘My bit of German soul,’ Ed liked to say to me with an apologetic grin after he had sounded too earnest for his own blood, or too didactic.

  Always his bit of German soul.

  In order to pull him up on his bicycle Tadzio had spoken German to Ed.

  Why? Would Ed really have otherwise mistaken him for a street drunk?

  And why am I thinking German, German, when all the time I should be thinking Russian, Russian?

  And tell me, please, since I am tone-deaf, why is it that every time my memory replays the dialogue between Ed and Gamma, I have a sensation of listening to the wrong music?

  If I have no clear answer to these fumbled questions, if the effect of them is only to intensify my mystification, the fact remains that by six o’clock that evening, thanks to Prue’s ministrations, I felt more belligerent, more able and a whole lot more ready than I had been at five that morning to take on whatever the Office had left to throw at me.

  *

  Six o’clock by the church clock, six o’clock by my wristwatch, six o’clock by Prue’s family grandfather clock in the hall. Another sun-baked evening of the great London drought. I’m sitting in my den upstairs wearing shorts and sandals. Prue is in the garden, watering her poor, parched roses. A bell rings, but it’s not the house phone. It’s the front door.

  I leap up, but Prue gets there first. We meet halfway on the stairs.

  ‘I think you’d better change into something more respectable,’ she says. ‘There’s a large man with a car outside who says he’s come to fetch you.’

  I go to the landing window and peer down. A black Ford Mondeo, two aerials. And Arthur, longtime driver to Bryn Jordan, propped against it enjoying a quiet fag.

  *

  The church stands at the top of Hampstead hill and that’s where Arthur sets me down. Bryn never held with comings and goings outside his house.

  ‘You know your way then,’ says Arthur, as a statement not a question. It’s the first time he has spoken since ‘Hullo, Nat.’ Yes, Arthur, know it well, thanks.

  Ever since I was the new boy of Moscow Station and Prue my Service spouse, Bryn, his beautiful Chinese wife Ah Chan, their three musical daughters and one difficult son had lived in this massive eighteenth-century hilltop villa overlooking Hampstead Heath. If we were recalled from Moscow for a brainstorming session, or on spells of home leave, this mellowed brick pile behind high gates with one bell-button was where we would all assemble for jolly family suppers with the daughters playing Schubert lieder and the bravest of us singing along with them; or if Christmas was coming, then madrigals, because the Bryns as we called them were Old Catholics and there was a Christ on the cross lurking in the shadows of the hall to tell you so. How a Welshman of all people becomes a devout Roman Catholic is beyond me, but it was in the nature of the man to be inexplicable.

  Bryn and Ah Chan were ten years older than we were. Their talented daughters had long embarked on their stellar careers. Ah Chan, Bryn explained as he greeted me with his customary warmth on the doorstep, was visiting her aged mother in San Francisco:

  ‘The old girl scored a century last week but she’s still waiting for her bloody telegram from the Queen, or whatever she sends these days,’ he complains boisterously, as he marches me down a corridor as long as a railway carriage. ‘We applied for it like good citizens, but Her Maj is not absolutely sure she qualifies if she’s Chinese-born and lives in San Francisco. On top of which the dear old Home Office has lost her file. Tip of the iceberg, if you ask me. Whole country in spasm. First thing you notice every time you come home: nothing works, everything’s a lash-up. Same feeling we used to have in Moscow, if you remember, back in those days.’

  Those days for the Cold War, the one his detractors say he’s still fighting. We are approaching the great drawing room.

  ‘And we’re a laughing stock to our beloved allies and neighbours, in case you haven’t noticed,’ he goes on merrily. ‘A bunch of post-imperial nostalgists who can’t run a fruit stall. Your impression too?’

  I say, pretty much.

  ‘And your pal Shannon feels the same way, evidently. Maybe that’s his motive: shame. Thought of that? The national humiliation, trickling down, taken personally. I could buy that.’

  I say, it’s a thought, although I never saw Ed as much of a nationalist.

  A high-raftered ceiling, cracked leather armchairs, dark icons, primitives of the old China Trade days, untidy heaps of aged books with slips of paper wedged in them, one broken wooden ski over the fireplace and a vast silver tray for our whisky, soda and cashews.

  ‘Bloody ice machine’s on the blink too,’ Bryn assures me proudly. ‘It would be. Everywhere you go in America, chaps offer you ice. And we Brits can’t even make the stuff. Par for the course. Still, you don’t do ice, do you?’

  He has remembered correctly. He always does. He pours two treble Scotches without asking me to say when, shoves a glass at me and with a twinkly smile waves me to sit. He sits himself and beams mischievous goodwill at me. In Moscow he was older than his years. Now youth has caught up with him in a big way. The watery blue eyes shine their semi-divine light, but it’s brighter and more directional. In Moscow, he had lived out his cover as Cultural Attaché with such brio, lecturing his bemused Russian audiences on so many erudite topics, that they were halfway to believing he was a straight diplomat. Cover, dear boy. Next to Godliness. Bryn has homilies like other people have small talk.

  I ask after the family. The girls are achieving marvellously, he confirms, Annie at the Courtauld, Eliza at the London Philharmonic – yes, cello indeed, how good of me to remember – squads of grandchildren born or expected. All utterly delightful, squeeze of the eyes.

  ‘And Toby?’ I enquire cautiously.

  ‘Oh, an utter failure,’ he replies with the dismissive gusto he applies to all bad news. ‘Completely hopeless. We bought him a twenty-two-foot boat with all the trimmings, fixed him up crabbing out of Falmouth, last we heard of him he was in New Zea
land getting himself into an absolute load of trouble.’

  Short silence for commiseration.

  ‘And Washington?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh my God, fucking awful, Nat’ – with an even wider smile – ‘civil wars breaking out like measles all over the shop and you never know who’s leaning which way for how long and who’s for the chop tomorrow. And no Thomas Wolsey to hold the ring. A couple of years ago we were America’s man in Europe. All right, spotty, not always easy. But we were in there, part of the package, outside the euro, thank God, and no wet dreams about unified foreign policies, defence policies or what have you’ – squeeze of the eyes, chortle. ‘And that was our special relationship with the United States for you. Sucking away merrily on the hind tit of American power. Getting our rocks off. Where are we now? Back of the queue behind the Huns and the Frogs. With a bloody sight less to offer. Total disaster.’

  Benign chuckle, and barely a hiatus as he advances to his next amusing topic:

  ‘I was rather taken by what your pal Shannon had to say about the Donald, incidentally: the notion that he’d had all the democratic chances and blown them. Not absolutely sure that’s true. Point about Trump is, he’s a gang boss, born and bred. Brought up to screw civil society all ways up, not be part of it. Your Shannon chap got that one wrong. Or am I being unfair?’

  Unfair to Trump or unfair to Ed?

  ‘And poor little Vladi Putin never had any democratic potty training at all,’ he goes on indulgently. ‘I’d agree with him on that one. Born a spy, still a spy, with Stalin’s paranoia to boot. Wakes up every morning amazed the West hasn’t blown him out of the water with a pre-emptive strike.’ Munches cashews. Washes them down with a thoughtful pull of Scotch. ‘He’s a dreamer, isn’t he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shannon.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What sort?’