Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

  If our marriage is not generally understood, neither is Prue. Outspoken, left-leaning lawyer to the poor and oppressed; intrepid champion of class actions; Battersea Bolshevik; none of the easy tag-lines that follow her around does justice to the Prue I know. For all her blue-chip background, she is self-made. Her father the judge was a bastard who hated competition in his children, made life hell for them and refused to support Prue at university or law school. Her mother died of alcohol. Her brother went to the devil. Her humanity and good sense need no underlining as far as I am concerned, but for others, particularly my chers collègues, sometimes they do.

  *

  The ecstatic greetings are over. The four of us are installed in the sunroom of our house in Battersea, talking happy banalities. Prue and Ed have the sofa. Prue has opened the doors to the garden to let in whatever breeze is around. She has set out candles and unearthed a box of fancy chocolates from her gift drawer for the bride and groom to be. She has rustled up a bottle of old Armagnac I didn’t know we possessed, and made coffee in the big picnic Thermos. But there is something that, amid all the fun, she needs to get off her mind:

  ‘Nat, darling, forgive me, but please don’t forget you and Steff have that bit of urgent business to discuss. I think you said nine o’clock’ – which is my cue to look at my watch, leap to my feet and, with a hasty ‘thank God you reminded me, back in two shakes’, hasten upstairs to my den.

  Taking from the wall a framed photograph of my late father in ceremonial drag, I place him face upward on my desk, extract a wad of writing paper from a drawer and lay it one sheet at a time on the glass surface in order to leave no imprint. It does not occur to me until later that I am observing ancient Office practice while setting out to break every rule in the Office book.

  I write first a summary of the intelligence so far available against Ed. I then set out ten field instructions, one clear paragraph at a time, no bloody adverbs as Florence would say. I top the document with her former Office symbol and tail it with my own. I re-read what I have written, find no fault with it, fold the page twice, insert it in a plain brown envelope and write Invoice for Mrs. Florence Shannon on it in an uneducated hand.

  I return to the sunroom to discover I am redundant. Prue has already cast Florence as her fellow escapee from the Office’s grasp, albeit an undeclared one, and therefore a woman with whom she has an immediate if unspecified rapport. The topic of the moment is builders. Florence, nursing a stiff glass of old Armagnac despite her professed addiction to red burgundy, is holding the floor while Ed dozes next to her on the sofa and periodically opens his eyes to adore her.

  ‘I mean honestly, Prue, dealing with Polish masons and Bulgarian carpenters and a Scottish foreman, I’m thinking, give me bloody subtitles!’ Florence announces to hoots of her own laughter.

  She needs a pee. Prue shows her the way. Ed watches them out of the room, then bows his head over his knees, puts his hands between them and lapses into one of his reveries. Florence’s leather jacket hangs over the back of a chair. Unnoticed by Ed, I pick it up, take it to the hall, slip my brown envelope into the right-hand pocket and hang it beside the front door. Florence and Prue return. Florence notices her jacket is missing and glances at me questioningly. Ed still has his head down.

  ‘Oh. Your jacket,’ I say. ‘I had a sudden fear you would forget it. There was something jutting out of the pocket. It looked horribly like a bill.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ she replies with scarcely a blink. ‘Probably the Polish electrician.’

  Message received.

  Prue delivers herself of a capsule account of her running battle with the barons of Big Pharma. Florence responds with a vigorous ‘They’re the worst of the worst. Fuck them all.’ Ed is half asleep. I suggest it’s time for all good children to go to bed. Florence agrees. They live the other side of London, she tells us, as if I didn’t know: one mile as the bicycle rides from Ground Beta, to be precise, but she doesn’t say that part. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Using my family mobile, I order an Uber. It arrives with eerie haste. I help Florence into her leather jacket. Their departure, after the many thank-yous, is mercifully swift.

  ‘Really, really great, Prue,’ says Florence.

  ‘Fab,’ Ed agrees through a fog of sleep, spumante and old Armagnac.

  We stand on the doorstep waving at their departing car. We keep waving till it’s out of sight. Prue takes my arm. How about a stroll in the park on this perfect summer’s night?

  *

  There’s a bench on the northern edge of the park that is set back from the footpath on its own bit of space between the river and a clump of willow trees. Prue and I call it our bench and it’s where we like to sit and roost after a dinner party if the weather’s right and we’ve got rid of our guests at a reasonable hour. It’s my memory that, by some leftover instinct from our Moscow days, we didn’t exchange one compromising word until were sitting on it, our voices drowned by the clatter of the river and the grumble of the night city.

  ‘Do you reckon it’s real?’ I ask her after a lengthy silence between us that I am the first to break.

  ‘You mean the two of them together?’

  Prue, normally so cautious in her judgements, has no doubt on the matter.

  ‘They were a pair of drifting corks and now they’ve found each other,’ she declares in her forthright way. ‘That’s Florence’s view and I’m happy to share it. They were cut from the same cork tree at birth and for as long she believes that they’re fine because he’ll believe whatever she does. She hopes she’s pregnant, but isn’t sure. So whatever you’ve been cooking up for Ed, just remember we’ll be doing it for all three of them.’

  *

  Prue and I may diverge about which of us thought what or said what in the murmured exchange that followed, but I remember very clearly how our two voices sank to Moscow level as if we were sitting on a bench in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure rather than Battersea. I told her everything that Bryn had told me, everything that Reni had told me, and she listened without comment. I scarcely bothered with Valentina and the saga of Ed’s unmasking, since that was already in the far past. The issue, as so often with operational planning, was how to use the enemy’s resources against him, although I was less eager than Prue to define the Office as enemy.

  And I remember that I was filled with simple gratitude, as we embarked on the fine-tuning of what gradually became our master plan, for the way our thoughts and words merged into a single flow where ownership became irrelevant. But Prue, for all the best reasons, doesn’t want to hear that. She points to the preparatory steps I had already taken, citing my all-important handwritten letter of instructions to Florence. In her version I am the driving force and she is trailing in my slipstream: just anything, as far as she’s concerned, rather than concede that the Office spouse of her youth and the lawyer of her maturity are even distantly related.

  What is certain is that by the time I stood up from our bench and strode a few yards along the river path while careful to remain within Prue’s hearing, and touched the key for Bryn Jordan on the doctored mobile he had given me, Prue and I were, as she would have it, in full and frank agreement on all matters of substance.

  *

  Bryn had warned me that he might be on his way between London and Washington, but the background clamour I am hearing in the earpiece tells me that he is on terra firma, has people round him, mostly men, and they’re American. My presumption therefore is that he is in Washington DC and I am interrupting a meeting, which means that with any luck I may not have his full attention.

  ‘Yes, Nat. How are we?’ – the habitually kindly tone, tinged with impatience.

  ‘Ed’s getting himself married, Bryn,’ I inform him flatly. ‘On Friday. To my former number two at the Haven. The woman we talked about. Florence. At a Register Office in Holborn. They left our house a few moments ago.’

  He offers no surprise. He knows already. He knows more than I do. When didn’t he? But I am
not his to command any more. I’m my own man. He needs me more than I need him. So remember it.

  ‘He wants me to be his best man, if you can believe it,’ I add.

  ‘And you accepted?’

  ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  Offstage burbles while he dispatches some pressing matter. ‘You had a full hour alone with him at the Club,’ Bryn reminds me testily. ‘Why the hell didn’t you go for him?’

  ‘How was I supposed to do that?’

  ‘Tell him that before you accept the job of best man, there are a couple of things he ought to know about himself, and take it from there. I’ve a bloody good mind to give the job to Guy. He won’t piss about.’

  ‘Bryn, will you listen to me please? The wedding is four days away. Shannon’s on a different planet. It isn’t a question of who approaches him. It’s a question of whether we approach him now or wait till he’s got himself married.’

  I too am being testy. I’m a free man. From our bench five yards along the river path, Prue awards me a silent nod of approval.

  ‘Shannon’s as high as a flute, Bryn. If I make a pass at him now, he’ll tell me to get lost and to hell with the consequences. Bryn?’

  ‘Wait!’

  I wait.

  ‘You listening?’

  Yes, Bryn.

  ‘I am not allowing Shannon to make another treff with Gamma or anyone else until we own him. Got that?’

  Treff for clandestine encounter. German spy jargon. And Bryn’s.

  ‘And I am seriously supposed to tell him that?’ I retort indignantly.

  ‘You’re supposed to get on with the fucking job and not waste any more time,’ he snaps back as the temperature between us rises.

  ‘I’m telling you, Bryn. He’s totally unmanageable in his present mood. Period. I’m not going there till he comes down to earth.’

  ‘Then where the hell are you going?’

  ‘Let me talk to his bride, Florence. She’s the only viable route to him.’

  ‘She’ll tip him off.’

  ‘She’s Office-trained and she worked for me. She’s savvy and she knows the odds. If I spell out the situation to her, she’ll spell it out to Shannon.’

  Background grumble before he comes back hard.

  ‘Is she conscious? The girl. To what her man’s up to.’

  ‘I’m not sure it matters what she is, Bryn. Not once I’ve spelt out the position to her. If she’s complicit, she’ll know she’s for the high jump too.’

  His voice eases slightly.

  ‘How do you propose to approach her?’

  ‘I’ll invite her to lunch.’

  More off-stage clatter. Then a vehement comeback: ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘She’s a grown-up, Bryn. She doesn’t do hysterics and she likes fish.’

  Voices off, but Bryn’s not among them.

  Finally: ‘Where will you take her, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘The same place I took her before.’ Time to pull a bit more temperament. ‘Look, Bryn, if you don’t like what I’m suggesting, fine by me, give the bloody job to Guy. Or come back and do it yourself.’

  From our bench, Prue is drawing a finger across her throat as a signal to hang up, but Bryn, with a terse ‘Report back to me the moment you’ve spoken to her,’ has beaten me to it.

  Heads down, arm in arm, we stroll back to the house.

  ‘I think she may have an inkling, all the same,’ Prue reflects. ‘She may not know a lot, but she knows quite enough to worry her.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have more than an inkling now,’ I reply brutally, as I picture Florence hunched alone amid the builders’ debris of their flat in Hoxton, reading my ten-point letter while Ed sleeps the sleep of the just.

  20

  It didn’t surprise me – I would have been a lot more surprised if it hadn’t been the case – that I had never seen Florence’s face so taut or so devoid of expression: not even when she was sitting across the table from me in this same restaurant reciting the charge sheet against Dom Trench and his charitable baroness.

  As to my own face, reflected in the many mirrors, well: operational deadpan best describes it.

  The restaurant is L-shaped. In the smaller section there is a bar with padded benches for guests who have been told their tables aren’t quite ready, so why not sit and drink champagne at twelve quid a flute. And that’s what I am doing now, as I wait for Florence to make her entry. But I am not the only one who is waiting for her. Gone the sleepy-wasp waiters. Today’s crew are obliging to a fault, beginning with the maître d’hôtel who can’t wait to show me the table I have reserved, or to enquire whether I or Madame will be having any dietary requirements or special needs. Our table is not in the window as I had requested – unfortunately all our window tables were long taken, sir – but he dares to hope that this quiet corner will be acceptable to me. He might have added ‘and acceptable to Percy Price’s microphones’ because according to Percy your windows, when there’s heavy background chatter to contend with, can play the very devil with your reception.

  But not even Percy’s wizards can cover every nook and corner of a crowded bar, hence the maître d’s next question of me, couched in the prophetic tense beloved of his trade:

  ‘And will we be thinking come straight to our table and enjoy our aperitif in peace and quiet, or will we be taking our chances at the bar, which can get a bit too lively for some?’

  Lively being precisely what I need and Percy’s microphones don’t, I opt for taking our chances at the bar. I choose a plush sofa for two and order a large glass of red burgundy in addition to my twelve-pound flute of champagne. A group of diners enters, as like as not supplied by Percy. Florence must have attached herself to them because the first thing I know she is sitting beside me with scarcely an acknowledgement. I indicate her glass of red burgundy. She shakes her head. I order water with ice and lemon. In place of Office fatigues, she wears her smart trouser suit. In place of the scruffy silver ring on her wedding finger, nothing.

  For my part, I am sporting a navy-blue blazer and grey flannels. In the right pocket of my blazer I am carrying a lipstick in a cylindrical brass holder. It is of Japanese manufacture and Prue’s one indulgence. Cut away the bottom half of the lipstick and you have a cavity deep and wide enough to accommodate a generous strip of microfilm or, in my case, a handwritten message on pared-down typing paper.

  Florence’s demeanour is faux-casual, precisely as it should be. I have invited her to lunch, but my tone was cryptic and in the legend she has yet to learn why: am I inviting her in my capacity as her future husband’s best man, or as her former superior? We trade banalities. She is polite, but on her guard. Keeping my voice below the hubbub, I advance to the matter in hand:

  ‘Question one,’ I say.

  She takes a breath and tilts her head so close to mine that I feel the prickle of her hair.

  ‘Yes, I still want to marry him.’

  ‘Next question?’

  ‘Yes, I told him to do it, but I didn’t know what it was.’

  ‘But you encouraged him,’ I suggest.

  ‘He said there was something he’d got to do to stop an anti-European conspiracy but it was against regulations.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘If he felt it, do it and fuck regulations.’

  Ignoring my questions, she plunges straight on.

  ‘After he’d done it – that was Friday – he came home and wept and wouldn’t say why. I told him that whatever he’d done was all right if he believed in it. He said he believed in it. I said, well you’re all right then, aren’t you?’

  Forgetting her earlier resolve, she takes a pull of her burgundy.

  ‘And if he found out who he’s been dealing with?’ I prompt.

  ‘He’d turn himself in or kill himself. Is that what you want to hear?’

  ‘It’s information.’

  Her voice starts to rise. She brings it down.

  ‘He can’t lie, Nat. The truth is
all he knows. He’d be useless as a double even if he agreed to do it, which he never would.’

  ‘And your wedding plans?’ I prompt her again.

  ‘I’ve invited the whole world and its brother to join us in the pub afterwards, as per your instructions. Ed thinks I’m insane.’

  ‘Where are you going for your honeymoon?’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘Book a hotel in Torquay as soon as you get home. The Imperial or equivalent. The bridal suite. Two nights. If they want a deposit, pay it. Now find a reason to open your handbag and put it between us.’

  She opens her handbag, extracts a tissue, dabs her eye, carelessly leaves the handbag open between us. I take a sip of my champagne and, with my left arm across my body, drop in Prue’s lipstick.

  ‘The moment we’re in the dining room we’re on air,’ I tell her. ‘The table’s wired and the restaurant is crammed with Percy’s people. Be as bloody difficult as you always were, then some. Understood?’

  Distant nod.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Understood, for fuck’s sake,’ she hisses back at me.

  The maître d’ is waiting for us. We settle to our nice corner table opposite each other. The maître d’ assures me I have the best view in the room. Percy must have sent him to charm school. The same enormous menus. I insist we have hors d’oeuvres. Florence demurs. I urge smoked salmon on her and she says all right. We agree on turbot for our main course.

  ‘So it’s both the same for us today, sir,’ the maître d’ exclaims, as if that makes a change from all the other days.

  Until now she has managed not to look at me. Now she does.

  ‘Do you mind telling me why the fuck you dragged me here?’ she demands into my face.

  ‘Very willingly,’ I reply in similarly clenched tones. ‘The man you are living with and apparently wish to marry has been identified by the Service you once belonged to as a willing asset of Russian intelligence. But perhaps that isn’t news to you? Or is it?’