A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré

  Are we also lovers, with all those years between us? Gradually, it seems we are. The arrangement was brokered by Isabelle, who one summer’s evening padded across the courtyard with her bedding and, never a glance at me, installed herself beneath the landing window on the floor outside my bedroom. My bed is large; the spare room is dark and cold; mother and child could not be separated. It is my memory that Catherine and I slept innocently side by side for weeks on end before turning towards each other. But perhaps we didn’t wait quite as long as I would like to think.

  *

  Of one thing at least I was sure: I would have no problem recognizing my pursuer. Clearing out Alec’s dismal bachelor pad in Holloway after his death, I had stumbled on a pocket-sized photo album with a pressed edelweiss slipped under the cellophane cover. I was on the point of tossing it away when I realized I was holding in my hand a photographic record of Christoph’s life from cradle to matriculation. The German subtitles in white ink under each snapshot had been added, I assumed, by his mother. What had impressed me was how the same locked expression that I remembered from the football match in Düsseldorf had stuck with him all the way to the thick-set, scowling, Alec-lookalike in a Sunday suit, clutching a scroll of parchment as if he was about to jam it in your face.

  And what does Christoph know of me, meanwhile? That I am in London, burying a friend. That I am being a Good Samaritan. I have no known address, I am not a club man. Not even a researcher of Christoph’s vaunted quality will find me listed at the Travellers or the National Liberal Club. Not in Stasi records, or anywhere else. My last known abode in the United Kingdom was a two-room flat in Acton that I had inhabited under the name of Peterson. When I gave my landlord notice, I left no forwarding address. So where, after Brittany, might severe, persistent, impolite, criminal Christoph, son of Alec, strong like a boxer, come looking for me? What would be the one place, the only place, where, if he is really lucky, he might, given a fair wind, just possibly run me to earth?

  Answer – or the only answer that made any sense to me – my old Service’s Lubyanka by the Thames: not the old, hard-to-find Circus of his father, but its gruesome successor, the bastion I was about to reconnoitre.

  *

  Vauxhall Bridge teems with homebound commuters. The river beneath it is fast-flowing and jam-packed with traffic. I am not a member of a Bulgarian tour group but an Antipodean tourist who is doing the sights of London: cowboy hat, khaki waistcoat with multiple pockets. For my first pass I wore a flat cap and tartan scarf, for my second an Arsenal supporter’s woolly hat with pom-pom. Net cost for the entire wardrobe at Waterloo station’s flea market, fourteen pounds. At Sarratt we called them silhouette changes.

  To every watcher there are distractions to beware of, I used to warn my young trainees: things your eye won’t let go, like the pretty girl bravely sunbathing on the balcony, or the street preacher dressed as Jesus Christ. For me, this evening, it’s a handkerchief-sized rectangle of lush green lawn entirely enclosed by spikes that my eyes refuse to let go. What is it? An outdoor punishment cell for Circus miscreants? A secret pleasure-garden for senior officers only? But how do they get in? Worse still, how do they get out?

  On a tiny pebble beach at the foot of the bastion’s outer ramparts, an Asian family in coloured silks picnics amid Canada geese. A yellow amphibious craft lumbers up the ramp beside them and stammers to a halt. Nobody emerges. The time is coming up to five-thirty. I am remembering Circus working hours: ten-till-whenever for the anointed, nine-thirty to five-thirty for the unwashed. A discreet exodus of junior staff is about to begin. I’m counting up likely exit points, which will be dispersed in order to be inconspicuous. When the bastion was first occupied by its present tenants there were tales of secret tunnels under the river all the way to Whitehall. Well, the Circus has dug a tunnel or two in its time, most of them under other people’s territory, so why not a couple under your own?

  When I first presented myself to Bunny, I had been passed through a man-door dwarfed by a pair of crash-proof iron gates with an art deco motif, but my guess was the man-door was visitors only. Of the three other exits I have spotted, the one that best suits my intuition is a pair of grey-painted doors set at the top of an inconspicuous flight of stone steps on the river side, giving access to the flow of pedestrians on the footpath. As I round the corner, the grey doors part and half-a-dozen men and women emerge, average age twenty-five to thirty. An expression of determined anonymity joins them. The doors close, I suspect electronically. They reopen. A second group descends.

  I am Christoph’s quarry, and his pursuer. I’m assuming he’s been doing what I’ve been doing this last half-hour: familiarizing himself with the target building, picking likely exits, biding his moment. I’m acting on the assumption that Christoph is driven by the same sound operational instincts as his father, that he has thought his way through the probable actions of his quarry and laid his plans accordingly. If, as Catherine says, I have gone to London to bury a friend – and why should he doubt it? – then it’s a racing certainty that I will also have dropped in on my former employers to chew over the irksome historical lawsuit that Christoph and his newfound friend Karen Gold are bringing against the Service and its named officers, of whom I am one.

  Another batch of men and women is descending the steps. As they reach the footpath, I tag along behind them. A grey-haired woman grants me a polite smile. She thinks she should recognize me. Pedestrians on the public footpath mingle with us. A sign says To Battersea Park. We approach an archway. I glance upwards and see the hatted figure of a large man in three-quarter-length dark overcoat, standing on the bridge, scanning passers-by below. The spot he has chosen, by chance or design, gives him a grandstand view of three of the bastion’s exits. Having profited from the same vantage point myself, I can confirm its tactical value. Owing to the downward turn of his head, and of his hat, which is a black Homburg with high crown and shallow brim, his face is in shadow. But his boxer’s bulk is not in doubt: broad shouldered, wide backed and a good three inches taller than I would have expected of Alec’s son; but then I never met his mother.

  We’re through the archway. Dark coat and black Homburg has left the bridge and joined the procession. For all his bulk, he’s a quick mover. So was Alec. He’s twenty yards behind me, Homburg bobbing from side to side. He’s trying to keep sight of someone or something ahead of him, and I’m inclined to think it’s me. Does he want me to spot him? Or am I being excessively surveillance-conscious, another sin I used to rail against?

  Joggers, cyclists and boats whisk past. To my left, apartment blocks. At their base, glitzy pavement restaurants, cafés, fast-food stalls. I am using reflections. I am slowing him down. I am remembering my own pontifications to new entrants: it’s you who sets the pace, not the person following you. Be idle. Be indecisive. Never run when you can saunter. The river hums with pleasure boats, ferry boats, skiffs, rowing boats, barges. On the bank, buskers make human statues, kids wave bubbles, fly toy drones. If you’re not Christoph, you’re a Circus watcher. But the Circus’s watchers, even in our worst days, were never this bad.

  At St George’s Wharf I peel away to my right and make a show of examining the timetable. You will identify your pursuer by giving him choices. Will he hop on to the bus after you, or will he say, to hell with the bus and walk on? If he walks on, maybe he’s leaving you to someone else. But the Homburg and black overcoat is not leaving me to someone else. He wants me for himself, and he’s hovering at a sausage stand, scrutinizing me in the fancy mirror behind the mustard and ketchup bottles.

  At the ticket machine for ferries heading east, a queue is forming. I join it, wait my turn, buy myself a ticket to Tower Bridge, single. My pursuer has decided not to buy himself a sausage. The ferry pulls alongside, the pier rocks, we let the passengers off first. My pursuer has crossed the path and is bending over the ticket machine. He gesticulates irritably. Help me, someone. A Rasta in baggy cap show
s him how it’s done. Cash, not credit card, and the face still in shadow under the Homburg. We are boarding. The top deck is packed with sightseers. The crowd is your friend. Use it well. I use the crowd on the top deck and find myself a space of railing while I wait for my pursuer to do the same. Does he realize I’m conscious to him? Are we into mutual awareness? Has he, as my Sarratt students would have said, clocked me clocking him? If he has, abort.

  Except I won’t abort. The boat turns. A shaft of sunlight picks him out, but the face remains in shadow, even if in the left margin of my line of sight I see him casting one stealthy glance after another at me, as if he’s afraid I’ll make a dash for it or chuck myself overboard.

  Can you really be Christoph, son of Alec? Or are you some lawyer’s bailiff, sent to slap a writ on me? But if that’s who you are, why stalk me? Why not barge up to me here and now, confront me? The boat swings again, and again the sunlight finds him. His head lifts. For the first time I see his face in profile. I have a feeling that I ought to be amazed and delighted, but I am neither. I feel no rush of kinship. I am aware only of a sense of impending reckoning: Christoph, son of Alec, with the same unblinking stare that I remember from the football stadium at Düsseldorf, and the same jutting Irish jaw.

  *

  If Christoph was reading my intentions, I was also reading his. He hadn’t identified himself to me because he was waiting to house me, as the watchers have it: to find out where I’m staying and, having done so, choose his time and place. My response must be to deny him the operational intelligence he was after and dictate my own terms, which should be a crowded spot with plenty of innocent bystanders. But Catherine’s warnings, added to my apprehensions, force me to consider the possibility of a violent man seeking redress for my perceived sins against his late father.

  It was with this contingency in mind that I recalled how as a small boy I had been marched round the Tower of London by my French mother, to her loud and embarrassing exclamations of horror at everything she saw. And I remembered in particular the great stairway on Tower Bridge. It was this stairway that now spoke to me, not for its iconic attractions, but for my self-preservation. Sarratt nursery did not teach self-defence. It taught a variety of ways of killing, some silently, others less so, but self-defence did not feature large on the menu. What I knew for certain was, if it did come to a fight, I needed my opponent’s weight above me, and all the help that gravity could provide. He was a prison-trained brawler with forty pounds of bone and muscle on me. I needed to use his weight against him, and I could think of no better place than a steep stairway, with my aged self standing a few steps beneath him to speed him on his way. I had already taken a couple of useless precautions: transferred any small change I had to my right-hand jacket pocket for use as short-range grapeshot, and threaded the middle finger of my left hand round my key-ring as an improvised knuckle-duster. Nobody ever lost a fight by preparing for it, did they, son? No, staff, they never did.

  We were queuing to disembark. Christoph was twelve feet behind me, his reflection in the glass door expressionless. Grey hair, Catherine had said. Now I saw why: a mass of it, bulging in all directions from beneath the Homburg, grey, wiry and untamed like Alec’s, the central mass of it plaited into a pigtail that hung down the back of his black overcoat. Why had Catherine not mentioned the pigtail? Maybe he tucked it inside his coat. Maybe pigtails weren’t uppermost in her mind. In laborious crocodile we filed up a ramp. Tower Bridge was down. A green light beckoned pedestrians to cross. Reaching the opening to the great stairway, I turned and looked directly back at him. I was saying to him: if you want to talk, we do it here, with people passing by. He too had stopped, but all I could see in his face and eyes was the football spectator’s relentless stare. I took a dozen quick steps down the stairway, which was empty save for a couple of down-and-outs. I needed a midway point. I needed him to have a long way to fall once he’d gone past me, because I didn’t want him coming back.

  The stairway filled up. Two giggling girls scampered past, hand in hand. A couple of monks in saffron were engaged in earnest philosophical discussion with a beggar. Christoph was standing at the top of the staircase, a hatted silhouette in an overcoat. Step by step, with studied care, he began to descend the staircase, arms half raised from his sides, feet wide, the wrestler’s stalk. You’re too slow, I urged him, come on down at me, I need your momentum. But he had drawn to a halt a couple of stairs above me, and for the first time I heard his adult voice, which was German American, and high-pitched, which somehow shocked me.

  ‘Hi, Peter. Hi, Pierre. It’s me. Christoph. Alec’s little boy, remember? Aren’t you pleased to see me? Don’t you want to shake my hand?’

  Releasing the small change in my pocket, I reached up my right hand to him. He grasped it, and kept it long enough for me to feel his strength, despite the slithery dampness of the palm.

  ‘What can I do for you, Christoph?’ I said, and for answer got one of Alec’s caustic laughs and that extra bit of Irish he put into his voice when he was camping himself up:

  ‘Well, boyo, you can buy me a bloody drink for a start!’

  *

  The restaurant was on the first floor of a self-styled Olde Towne House with fake worm-eaten beams and a slanted view of the Tower through mitred windows. The waitresses wore bonnets and pinafores, and we could have a table if we agreed to eat a full meal. Christoph sat with his huge body slumped in his chair, and his Homburg hat pulled down over his eyes. The waitress brought beer, which was what he’d asked for. He took a sip, pulled a face, set it aside. Fingernails black and chipped. Rings on every finger of his left hand. On his right hand, just the two middle ones that count. The face Alec’s, but with pouchy discontent where pain lines should have been. The same pugnacious jaw. In the brown eyes, when they bothered with you, the same flashes of buccaneering charm.

  ‘So what are you doing with yourself these days, Christoph?’ I asked him. He thought for a while.

  ‘These days?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I guess the short answer is: this,’ he replied, giving me the big smile.

  ‘This being what exactly? I don’t think I’ve got the whole story.’

  But he shook his head as if to say it didn’t matter, and only sat up straight when the waitress brought our steak and chips.

  ‘Nice place you’ve got over there in Brittany,’ he remarked, eating. ‘How many hectares?’

  ‘Fifty odd. Why?’

  ‘Your own?’

  ‘What are we talking about, Christoph? Why did you come looking for me?’

  He took another mouthful, tipped his head and smiled at me to say I’d made a good point.

  ‘Why I came looking for you? Thirty years now, I’ve been a fortune hunter. Travelled the whole world. I did diamonds. I did gold. I did dope. I did guns a little. I did jail. Too much. Did I find my fortune? Did I fuck. Then I come home to little old Europe, and I find you. My goldmine. My dad’s best friend. His best comrade. And what did you do to your best comrade? You got him killed. That’s money, man. That’s real money.’

  ‘I didn’t get your father killed.’

  ‘Read the files, man. Read the Stasi files. They’re dynamite. You and George Smiley killed my father. Smiley was the ringleader. You were like his number-one gofer. You set my dad up, and you killed him. Directly or indirectly, that’s what you did. And you dragged Miss Elizabeth Gold into the game. It’s all in the fucking files, man! This great wicked plot you dreamed up that backfired on you and killed everybody. You lied to my dad! You and your big George. You lied to my daddy and you sent him to his death. Deliberately. Ask the lawyers. You know what? Patriotism is dead, man. Patriotism is for babies. If this case goes international, patriotism as a justification will not fly. Patriotism in mitigation is officially fucked. Same as elites. Same as you guys,’ he added and, about to take a refreshing pull of beer, changed his mind and rum
maged in the pocket of his black coat, which he had continued to wear despite the heat. From a battered tin box he poured a dab of white powder on to his wrist and, closing one nostril with his spare hand, snorted it in full view of any customer who cared to watch, and several did.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Saving your fucking life, man,’ he replied and, reaching out with both hands, grasped my wrist in a gesture of true fealty.

  ‘So here’s the deal. Your dream ticket. Okay? My personal offer to you. The best offer you’ll ever get in your life. You’re my friend, okay?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I had prised myself free of him, but he was still gazing dotingly at me.

  ‘You have no other friend. There is no other deal on the table. This is a one-time offer. Without prejudice. Non-negotiable.’ He picks up his tankard, drains it and signals to the waitress for another. ‘One million euros. To me personally. No third parties involved. One million euros on the day the lawyers drop the lawsuit, and you never hear from me again. No lawyers, no human rights, no bullshit. You just bought the whole package. Why are you looking at me? You got a problem?’

  ‘No problem. Just that it seems cheap at the price. I had rather understood your lawyers have already refused that amount and more.’

  ‘You’re not listening. I am offering you cut price. That’s what I’m saying. I am offering you cut price, one payment only, to me, one million euros.’

  ‘And Liz Gold’s daughter Karen – she’s happy, I take it?’