A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  ‘Where’s Christoph?’ I ask.

  ‘Had to head back home,’ he replies gruffly. ‘Mum’s orders.’

  And for the rest of the weekend that was that. Dagmar and I spent more happy times in bed, and what Alec got up to I’ve no idea. I just assumed that Christoph was the son of one of his joes and needed an outing, because with joes it’s welfare first and everything else second. It wasn’t till I was about to return to London and Dagmar was safely back in Stockholm with her husband, and Alec and I were having a farewell drink together in one of his many favourite Berlin watering holes, that I asked him casually ‘How’s Christoph?’ because it had crossed my mind that the boy had seemed a bit astray, a bit hard to please, and probably I even said something to this effect.

  At first I thought I was going to get another of those odd silences, because he had turned away from me so that I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘I’m his bloody father, for Christ’s sake,’ he said.

  Then in short, reluctant bursts, mostly without verbs, and not even bothering to tell me to keep it to myself because he knew I would, the story, or as much of it as he was willing to tell: German woman courier he’d used when he was based in Bern and she lived in Düsseldorf: good girl, good pals, had a fling with her. Wanted me to marry her. Wouldn’t, so she married a local lawyer. Lawyer adopted the boy, only decent thing he ever did. She lets me see him now and then. Can’t tell her bloody husband or the bastard would beat her up.

  And the final image that I’m seeing now, as I rouse myself from my austerity chair: Alec and the boy Christoph, standing shoulder to shoulder, staring rigidly at the match. And the same set expression on their faces, and the same Irish jaw.

  *

  At some point in the night I must have slept, but had no memory of it. The time in Dolphin Square is six a.m., in Brittany seven. Catherine will be up and about by now. If I was at home, I would be up and about too, because Isabelle starts her singing as soon as Chevalier, our chief cockerel, starts his. Her voice carries straight across the courtyard from Catherine’s cottage because Isabelle needs her bedroom window open at all times, never mind the weather. They will have fed the goats their breakfast, and Catherine will be feeding Isabelle hers, probably in a chase game round the courtyard with Isabelle escaping and Catherine coming after her with a spoonful of yoghurt. And the chickens, under the useless command of Chevalier, generally behaving as if the world is ending.

  As I pictured this scene it crossed my mind that if I called the main house and Catherine happened to be passing, and had her keys with her, she might hear the ring and answer it. So I gave it a shot on the off-chance, using one of my disposable mobile phones because I was damned if I was going to have Bunny listening. There’s no answering system on the farm phone, so I let it ring for a few minutes and was just giving up hope when I heard Catherine’s voice, which is Breton, and sometimes a little more severe than perhaps she intends.

  ‘You are well, Pierre?’

  ‘Fine. You too, Catherine?’

  ‘You have said goodbye to your friend who died?’

  ‘Still a couple of days to go.’

  ‘You will make a big speech?’

  ‘Enormous.’

  ‘You are nervous?’

  ‘Terrified. How’s Isabelle?’

  ‘Isabelle is well. She has not changed in your absence.’ By now I had noticed an undertone of annoyance, or something stronger in her voice. ‘A friend came to visit you yesterday. You were expecting a friend, Pierre?’

  ‘No. What sort of a friend?’

  But, like every tough questioner, Catherine has her own way with answers: ‘I told him: no, Pierre is not here, Pierre is in London, he is being a Good Samaritan, somebody has died, he has gone to comfort those who are grieving.’

  ‘But who was he, Catherine?’

  ‘He didn’t smile. He was not polite. He was persistent.’

  ‘You mean he made a pass at you?’

  ‘He asked who had died. I said I don’t know. He asked why don’t I know? I said, because Pierre does not tell me everything. He laughed. He said, maybe at Pierre’s age, all friends are dying. He asked, was it sudden? Was it a woman, a man? He asked, do you stay in a hotel in London? Which one? What is the address? What is the name? I say I don’t know. I am busy, I have a child and a farm.’

  ‘Was he French?’

  ‘Maybe German. Maybe American.’

  ‘Did he come by car?’

  ‘Taxi. From the station. With Gascon. First you pay me, Gascon told him. Otherwise, I don’t drive you.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was not agreeable, Pierre. Farouche. Big like a boxer. Many rings on his fingers.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Maybe fifty. Sixty. I did not count his teeth. Maybe more.’

  ‘Did he tell you his name?’

  ‘He said it was not necessary. He said you are old friends. He said you watch football together.’

  I lie motionless, barely breathing. I think I should get out of bed, but have a fuite du courage. How the devil, Christoph, son of Alec, litigant, purloiner of closed Stasi files, criminal with a record as long as your arm, did you find your way to Brittany?

  The farmstead at Les Deux Eglises had come down to me on my mother’s side. It still bore her maiden name. There was no Pierre Guillam in the local phone book. Had Bunny for his own arcane reasons slipped Christoph my address? To what conceivable purpose?

  Then I remember my motorcycle pilgrimage to a rain-swept cemetery in Berlin on a pitch-dark winter’s day in 1989 and everything makes sense.

  *

  The Berlin Wall has been down a month. Germany is ecstatic, our village in Brittany a little less so. And I seem to be hovering somewhere between the two, one minute rejoicing that peace of a sort has broken out, then lapsing into introspection as I think of the stuff we did and the sacrifices we made, not least of other people’s lives, in the long years when we thought the Wall was going to be there for ever.

  It was in this uncertain mood that I was wrestling with the farmstead’s annual tax returns in the counting room at Les Deux Eglises when our new young postman Denis, not yet dignified by Monsieur, and certainly not le Général, arrived not by yellow van but by pushbike, and handed a letter, not to me but to old Antoine, a one-legged war veteran, who as usual was hanging around the courtyard with a pitchfork in his hands and nothing in particular to do.

  Having examined the envelope front and back, and conceded that I might have it after all, Antoine hobbled to the door, presented me with it, then stood back to scrutinize me while I read the contents.

  Mürren,

  Switzerland

  Dear Peter,

  I thought you would wish to know that the ashes of our friend Alec have recently been laid to rest in Berlin, close to the spot where he died. It seems that the bodies of those murdered at the Wall were customarily incinerated in secret, and their ashes dispersed. Thanks to meticulous Stasi records, however, it appears that exceptional steps were taken in Alec’s case. His remains have come to light and he has been given a decent, if belated, funeral.

  As ever,

  George

  And on a separate sheet of paper – old habits die hard – the address of a small cemetery in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, officially set aside for victims of war and tyranny.

  I was with Diane at the time, another passing fancy nearing its end. I think I told her that a friend was ill. Or maybe that the friend had died. I jumped on my motorbike – it was still those days – drove myself non-stop to Berlin through some of the worst weather I’d ever come across, went straight to the cemetery and asked at the entrance where I would find Alec. Dense, non-stop rain. An old man who was some kind of sacristan gave me an umbrella and a map and pointed me down a long grey avenue of trees. After hunting around, I fo
und what I was looking for: one fresh grave, one marble headstone inscribed ALEC JOHANNES LEAMAS, washed eerily white by the rain. No dates, no job description, and a full-length mound to indicate a body where only ashes lay. For cover? All those years of knowing you, I thought, and you never told me about the Johannes: typical. I hadn’t brought flowers; I thought he’d laugh at me. So I stood under my umbrella and had a sort of internal dialogue with him.

  As I was getting back on my bike, the old man asked me whether I’d like to sign the condolence book. Condolence book? It was his personal duty to maintain one, he explained; not so much a duty, more as a service to the departed. So I said why not? The first entry was signed ‘GS’, address ‘London’. In the tributes column, the one word ‘Friend’. So that was George, or as much of him as he was willing to admit to. Below George, a bunch of German names that meant nothing to me, with tributes like ‘Never forgotten’, until we reach the one name ‘Christoph’, on its own, no surname after it. And under tributes, the word ‘Sohn’ – son. And under home address, ‘Düsseldorf’.

  Was it a passing fit of euphoria about the Wall coming down and all the world being free again, which I severely doubt – or a gut feeling that I’d done enough secrecy in my life – or simply an urge to stand up in the pouring rain and be counted as another of Alec’s friends? Whatever it was, I did the lot: wrote down my real name, my real address in Brittany, and in the tributes column, because I couldn’t think of anything better, ‘Pierrot’, which was what Alec called me on the rare occasions he was feeling affectionate.

  And Christoph, my farouche fellow mourner and Alec’s son? What did you do? On one of your later visits to your father’s grave – I am assuming on no particular grounds that you made a few more, if only for research purposes – you happened to take another look in the condolence book, and what did you see? Peter Guillam and Les Deux Eglises written out for you en clair, not an alias, not a cover address or a safe house, just the unprotected me and where I live. And that’s what got you all the way to Brittany from Düsseldorf.

  So what’s your next move, Christoph, son of Alec? I’m hearing Bunny’s fruity legal voice from yesterday:

  Christoph is not without his talents, Peter. Perhaps the genes help.

  6

  ‘Pete here is our reader,’ Laura had declared to her admiring audience. ‘For his reading Pete will be accommodated here in the library.’ I see myself in the days that followed, not so much a reader as some sort of senior student forced to sit an examination he should have taken half a lifetime ago. Intermittently, the late developer is hauled out of the examination room and compelled to undergo a viva voce by examiners whose knowledge of his subject is mysteriously uneven, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to give him a hard time. Intermittently, he is so appalled by the antics of his earlier self that he is on the verge of denying them, until the evidence condemns him out of his own mouth. Each morning on arrival I am served with a wad of folders, some familiar, some not. Just because you’ve stolen a file, doesn’t mean you’ve read it.

  On the morning of my second day, the library remained closed to all comers. From the thumps that issued from it, and the scurrying of tracksuited young men and women I wasn’t introduced to, I assumed an all-night fingertip search. Then, by afternoon, an ominous quiet. My desk was not a desk, but a trestle table set gallows-like at the centre of the library floor. The bookshelves were gone, leaving only a ghostly imprint like the shadow of prison bars on the Anaglypta walls.

  ‘When you hit a rosette, stop,’ Laura commands me, and departs.

  Rosette? She means the pink-headed paperclips wedged at intervals among the folders. Nelson silently assumes the invigilator’s chair and opens a hefty paperback. Henri Troyat’s life of Tolstoy.

  ‘Give us a shout if you want a pee break, right? My dad pees like every ten minutes.’

  ‘Poor chap.’

  ‘Just don’t take anything with you.’

  *

  A freak evening when Laura without explanation replaces Nelson on the invigilator’s chair and, having surveyed me dourly for half an hour or more, says:

  ‘Fuck it. Want to take me out for a free meal, Pete?’

  ‘Now?’ I say.

  ‘Now. Tonight. When do you think?’

  Free to whom? I’m wondering as I shrug my cautious acquiescence. Free to her? Me? Or free to both of us because the Office is setting us up? We adjourn to a Greek restaurant up the road. She’s booked a table. She’s wearing a skirt. It’s a corner table, with an unlit candle in a red cage. I don’t know why the image of the unlit candle lingers, but it does. And the patron leaning over us, lighting it and telling me I have the best view in the room, meaning Laura.

  We have an ouzo, then another. Straight, no ice, her idea. So is she a lush, is she on the make – me at my age, for Christ’s sake? – or does she think alcohol is going to loosen the old fart’s tongue? And what should I be making of the very ordinary middle-aged couple sitting at the next table and determinedly not looking at us?

  She’s wearing a sleeveless halter top that sparkles in the candlelight and the neckline has slipped southward. We order the usual starters – tarama, houmous, whitebait – she adores moussaka so we settle for two, and she starts on a different kind of interrogation, the flirtatious kind. So is it really true, Pete, what you told Bunny, that you and Catherine are just good friends?

  ‘Because frankly, Pete’ – voice softening to intimate – ‘what with your record, how can you possibly be shacked up with a super-attractive French girl you don’t even shag? Unless of course you’re secretly gay, which is what Bunny thinks. Mind you, Bunny thinks everyone’s gay. So he’s probably gay himself, and won’t admit it.’

  One half of me wants to tell her to go to hell, the other half wants to know what she thinks she’s up to. So I let it go.

  ‘But I mean honestly, Pete, it’s crazy!’ she persists. ‘I mean, don’t tell me you’ve withdrawn your cavalry from the charge, as my dad used to say: an old stoat like you, you can’t possibly!’

  I ask her, against my better instincts, what makes her think Catherine is so attractive? And she says, oh, a little bird has told her. We’re drinking Greek red, black as ink and tastes like it, and she’s leaning forward, giving me the full benefit of her neckline.

  ‘So, Pete, tell me true. Scout’s honour, okay? Of all the women you’ve bonked over the years – who gets the absolute number-one slot?’ – her unfortunate choice of the word slot causing her to collapse in a fit of giggles.

  ‘How about you first?’ I retort, and the joke’s over.

  I call for the bill, the couple next door call for theirs. She says she’ll take the tube. I say I’ll walk a bit. And to this day I have no idea whether she was on a mission to draw me out; or was she just another unattached soul, looking for a bit of human warmth?

  *

  I am the Reader. The buff cover of the folder I am reading is blank except for a handwritten file reference – whose hand escapes me, but probably my own. The leading serial is marked Top Secret and Guard, which means keep it away from the Americans, and it is a report – apologia would be a better word – written by one Stavros de Jong, all six foot three of him, an ungainly Circus trainee of twenty-five. Stas for short is a Cambridge graduate with six months still to go before his confirmation. He’s on attachment to Berlin Station’s Covert section, which is commanded by my comrade-in-arms in a string of abortive operations, the veteran fieldman Alec Leamas.

  As a matter of protocol, Leamas as local commander is also de facto deputy Head of Station. Stas’s report is accordingly addressed to Leamas in that capacity, and forwarded to his Head of Covert in London, George Smiley.

  Report by S. de Jong to DH/Station Berlin [Leamas], copy to JS [Joint Steering].

  I am instructed to submit the following report.

  New Year’s Day being cold but sunny and a
public holiday, my wife Pippa and I decided to take our children (Barney, 3 and Lucy, 5) and our Jack Russell (Loftus) to Köpenick, East Berlin, for a lakeside picnic in warm clothes, and a ramble in the adjoining woods.

  Our family car is a blue Volvo estate with British military number plates front and rear, entitling us to unrestricted passage between Berlin sectors, Köpenick in East Berlin being one of our regular picnic spots and a favourite with the children.

  I parked as per usual beside the perimeter wall of Köpenick’s old brewery, now abandoned. There was no other car in sight, and at the waterside only a few seated fishermen who ignored us. From the car, we carried our picnic basket through the woods to our usual grass promontory beside the lake, and afterwards played hide-and-seek with Loftus barking loudly, to the irritation of one of the fishermen who shouted abuse at us over his shoulder, insisting Loftus had disturbed the fish.

  The man was gaunt and in his fifties with greying hair, and I would recognize him if I saw him again. He wore a black peak cap and an old Wehrmacht topcoat stripped of its markings.

  It being by now around 1530 hours and Barney due for his rest, we packed our picnic things together and let the children run ahead to the car carrying the basket between them, with Loftus following and barking.