The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  “That wasn’t Ric’s way,” she said finally, without any conviction at all. “He liked to be the big man around town. It wasn’t his way to run.”

  “For example,” Jerry continued—as her head fell forward in submission—“were we to prove that your Ric, in flogging his kegs, had stuck to the cash and instead of passing it back to the distillery—pure hypothesis, no shred of evidence—then in that case—”

  “By the time our partnership was wound up, every investor had a certificated contract with interest from the date of purchase. Every penny we borrowed was duly accounted for.”

  Till now, it all had been footwork. Now he saw his goal looming, and he made for it fast.

  “Not duly, sport,” he corrected her, while she continued to stare down at her uneaten food. “Not duly at all. Those settlements were made six months after the due date. Unduly. That’s a very eloquent point, in my view. Question: who bailed Rick out? According to our information, the whole world was going for him. The distillers, the creditors, the law, the local community— every one of them had the knife sharpened for him. Till one day—bingo! Writs withdrawn, shades of the prison bars recede. How? Ric was on his knees. Who’s the mystery angel? Who bought his debts?”

  She had lifted her head while he was speaking and now to his astonishment a radiant smile suddenly lit her face, and the next thing he knew, she was waving over his shoulder at someone he couldn’t see till he looked into the ceiling mirror and caught the glitter of an electric-blue suit and a full head of black hair well greased; and between the two, a foreshortened chubby Chinese face set on a pair of powerful shoulders, and two curled hands held out in a fighter’s greeting while Lizzie piped him aboard.

  “Mr. Tiu! What a marvellous coincidence. Come on over! Try the beef. It’s gorgeous. Mr. Tiu, this is Jerry, from Fleet Street. Jerry, this is a very good friend of mine who helps look after me. He’s interviewing me, Mr. Tiu! Me! It’s most exciting. All about Vientiane and a poor pilot I tried to help a hundred years ago. Jerry knows everything about me. He’s a miracle!”

  “We met,” said Jerry, with a broad grin.

  “Sure,” said Tiu, equally happy, and as he spoke, Jerry once more caught the familiar smell of almonds and rose-water mixed, the one his early wife had so much liked. “Sure,” Tiu repeated. “You the horse-writer, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jerry agreed, stretching his smile to breaking-point.

  Then of course Jerry’s vision of the world turned several somersaults, and he had a whole lot of business to worry about: such as appearing to be as tickled as everybody else by the amazing good luck of Tiu’s appearance; such as shaking hands, which was like a mutual promise of future settlement; such as drawing up a chair and calling for drinks, beef and chopsticks, and all the rest. But the thing that stuck in his mind even while he did all this—the memory that lodged there as permanently as later events allowed—had little to do with Tiu or his hasty arrival; or not directly. It was the expression on Lizzie’s face as she first caught sight of him, for the fraction of a second before the lines of courage drew the gay smile out of her. It explained to him as nothing else could have done the paradoxes that comprised her: her prisoner’s dreams, her borrowed personalities which were like disguises in which she could momentarily escape her destiny. Of course she had summoned Tiu: she had no choice. It amazed him that neither the Circus nor he himself had predicted it. The Ricardo story, whatever the truth of it, was far too hot for her to handle by herself. But the expression in her grey eyes as Tiu entered the restaurant was not relief, but resignation: the doors had slammed on her again; the fun was over. “We’re like those bloody glow-worms,” the orphan had whispered to him once, raging about her childhood, “carting the bloody fire round on our backs.”

  Operationally of course, as Jerry recognised immediately, Tiu’s appearance was a gift from the gods. If information was to be fed back to Ko, then Tiu was an infinitely more impressive channel for it than Lizzie Worthington could ever hope to be.

  She had finished kissing Tiu, so she handed him to Jerry.

  “Mr. Tiu, you’re my witness,” she declared, making a great conspiracy of it. “You must remember every word I say. Jerry, go straight on just as if he wasn’t here. I mean Mr. Tiu’s as silent as the grave, aren’t you. Darling,” she said, and kissed him again. “It’s so exciting,” she repeated, and they all settled down for a friendly chat.

  “So what you looking for, Mr. Wessby?” Tiu enquired, perfectly affably, while he tucked into his beef. “You a horse-writer, why you bother pretty girls, okay?”

  “Good point, sport! Good point! Horses much safer, right?”

  They all laughed richly, avoiding one another’s eyes.

  The waiter put a half-bottle of Black Label Scotch in front of Tiu. He unscrewed it and sniffed at it critically before pouring.

  “He’s looking for Ricardo, Mr. Tiu. Don’t you understand? He thinks Ricardo is alive. Isn’t that wonderful? I mean I have no vestige of feeling for him now, naturally, but it would be lovely to have him back with us. Think of the party we could give!”

  “Liese tell you that?” Tiu asked, pouring himself two inches of Scotch. “She tell you Ricardo still around?”

  “Who, old boy? Didn’t get you. Didn’t get the first name.”

  Tiu jabbed a chopstick at Lizzie. “She tell you he’s alive? This pilot guy? This Ricardo? Liese tell you that?”

  “I never reveal my sources, Mr. Tiu,” said Jerry, just as archly. “That’s a journalist’s way of saying he’s made something up,” he explained.

  “A horse-writer’s way, okay?”

  “That’s it, that’s it!”

  Again Tiu laughed, and this time Lizzie laughed even louder. She was slipping out of control again. Maybe it’s the drink, thought Jerry, or maybe she goes for the stronger stuff and the drink has stoked the fire. And if he calls me horse-writer again, maybe I’ll take defensive action.

  Lizzie again, a party-piece: “Oh, Mr. Tiu, Ricardo was so lucky! Think who he had. Indocharter—me—everyone. There I was, working for this little airline—some dear Chinese people Daddy knew—and Ricardo, like all the pilots, was a shocking businessman—got into the most frightful debt.” With a wave of her hand, she brought Jerry into the act. “My God, he even tried to involve me in one of his schemes, can you imagine!— selling whisky, if you please—and suddenly my lovely, dotty Chinese friends decided they needed another charter pilot. They settled his debts, put him on a salary, they gave him an old banger to fly—”

  Jerry now took the first of several irrevocable steps. “When Ricardo went missing, he wasn’t flying an old banger, sport. He was flying a brand-new Beechcraft,” he corrected her deliberately. “Indocharter never had a Beechcraft to their name. They haven’t now. My editor’s checked it right through—don’t ask me how. Indocharter never hired one, never leased one, never crashed one.”

  Tiu gave another jolly whoop of laughter.

  Tiu is a very cool bishop, Your Eminence, Craw had warned. Ran Monsignor Ko’s San Francisco diocese with exemplary efficiency for five years, and the worst the narcotics artists could hang on him was washing his Rolls-Royce on a saint’s day.

  “Hey, Mr. Wessby, maybe Liese stole them one!” Tiu cried in his half-American accent. “Maybe she go out nights steal aircraft from other airlines!”

  “Mr. Tiu, that’s very naughty of you!” Lizzie declared.

  “How you like that, horse-writer? How you like?”

  The merriment at their table was by now so loud for three people that several heads turned to peer at them. Jerry saw them in the mirrors, where he half expected to spot Ko himself, with his crooked boat people’s walk, swaying toward them through the wicker doorway. Lizzie plunged wildly on.

  “Oh, it was a complete fairy tale! One moment Ric can scarcely eat, and owed all of us money—Charlie’s savings, my allowance from Daddy—Ric practically ruined us all. Of course everyone’s money just naturally belonged to him—and the n
ext thing we knew, Ric had work, he was in the clear, life was a ball again. All those other poor pilots grounded, and Ric and Charlie flying all over the place like—”

  “Like blue-arsed flies,” Jerry suggested, at which Tiu was so doubled with hilarity that he was obliged to hold on to Jerry’s shoulder to keep himself afloat—while Jerry had the uncomfortable feeling of being physically measured for the knife.

  “Hey listen, that pretty good! Blue-arse fly! I like that! You pretty funny fellow, horse-writer!”

  It was at this point, under the pressure of Tiu’s cheerful insults, that Jerry used very good footwork indeed. Afterwards, Craw said the best. He ignored Tiu entirely and picked up that other name which Lizzie had let slip:

  “Yeah, whatever happened to old Charlie, by the way?” he asked, not having the least idea who Charlie was. “What became of him after Ric did his disappearing number? Don’t tell me he went down with his ship as well?”

  Once more she floated away on a fresh wave of narrative, and Tiu patently enjoyed everything he heard, chuckling and nodding while he ate.

  He’s here to find out the score, Jerry thought. He’s much too sharp to put the brakes on Lizzie. It’s me he’s worried about, not her.

  “Oh, Charlie’s indestructible, completely immortal,” Lizzie declared, and once more selected Tiu as her foil: “Charlie Marshall, Mr. Tiu,” she explained. “Oh, you should meet him, a fantastic half-Chinese, all skin and bones and opium and a completely brilliant pilot. His father’s old Kuomintang, a terrific brigand, and lives up in the Shans. His mother was some poor Corsican girl—you know how the Corsicans flocked into Indo-China—but really he is an utterly fantastic character. Do you know why he calls himself Marshall? His father wouldn’t give him his own name. So what does Charlie do? Gives himself the highest rank in the army instead. ‘My dad’s a general but I’m a marshal,’ he’d say. Isn’t that cute? And far better than admiral, I mean.”

  “Super,” Jerry agreed. “Marvellous. Charlie’s a prince.”

  “Liese some pretty utterly fantastic character herself, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu remarked handsomely, so on Jerry’s insistence they drank to that—to her fantastic character.

  “Hey, what’s all this ‘Liese’ thing, actually?” Jerry asked as he put down his glass. “You’re Lizzie. Who’s this Liese? Mr. Tiu, I don’t know the lady. Why am I left out of the joke?”

  Here Lizzie did definitely turn to Tiu for guidance, but Tiu had ordered himself some raw fish and was eating it rapidly and with total devotion.

  “Some horse-writer ask pretty damn questions,” he remarked, through a full mouth.

  “New town, new leaf, new name,” Lizzie said finally, with an unconvincing smile. “I wanted a change, so I chose a new name. Some girls get a new hair-do, I get a new name.”

  “Got a new fellow to go with it?” Jerry asked.

  She shook her head, eyes down, while Tiu let out a whoop of laughter.

  “What’s happened to this town, Mr. Tiu?” Jerry demanded, instinctively covering for her. “Chaps all gone blind or something? Crikey, I’d cross continents for her, wouldn’t you? Whatever she calls herself, right?”

  “Me, I go from Kowloon-side to Hong Kong-side, no further!” said Tiu, hugely entertained by his own wit. “Or maybe I stay Kowloon-side and call her up, tell her come over see me one hour!” At which Lizzie’s eyes stayed down and Jerry thought it would be quite fun, on another occasion when they all had more time, to break Tiu’s fat neck in several places.

  Unfortunately, however, breaking Tiu’s neck was not at present on Craw’s shopping list.

  The money, Craw had said. When the moment’s right, open up one end of the gold seam and that’s your grand finale.

  So he started her off about Indocharter. Who were they, what was it like to work for them? She rose to it so fast he began to wonder whether she enjoyed this knife-edge existence more than he had realised.

  “Oh, it was a fabulous adventure, Jerry! You can’t begin to imagine it, I assure you.” Ric’s multinational accent again. “ ‘Airline’—just the word is so absurd. I mean don’t for a minute think of your bright new planes and your glamorous hostesses and champagne and caviar or anything like that at all. This was work. This was pioneering, which is what drew me in the first place. I could perfectly well have simply lived off Daddy, or my aunts. I mean mercifully I’m totally independent, but who can resist challenge? All we started out with was a couple of dreadful old DC-3s literally stuck together with string and chewing-gum. We even had to buy the safety certificates. Nobody would issue them. After that we flew literally anything. Hondas, vegetables, pigs—oh, the boys had such a story about those poor pigs. They broke loose, Jerry. They came into the first class, even into the cabin, imagine!”

  “Like passengers,” Tiu explained, with his mouth full. “She fly first-class pigs, okay, Mr. Wessby?”

  “What routes?” Jerry asked when they had recovered from their laughter.

  “You can see how he interrogates me, Mr. Tiu? I never knew I was so glamorous! So mysterious! We flew everywhere, Jerry. Bangkok, Cambodia sometimes. Battambang, Phnom Penh, Kampong Cham when it was open. Everywhere. Awful places.”

  “And who were your customers? Traders, taxi jobs—who were the regulars?”

  “Absolutely anyone we could get. Anyone who could pay. Preferably in advance, naturally.”

  Pausing from his Kobe beef, Tiu felt inspired to offer social chit-chat.

  “Your father some big lord, okay, Mr. Wessby?”

  “More or less,” said Jerry.

  “Lords some pretty rich fellows. Why you gotta be a horsewriter, okay?”

  Ignoring Tiu entirely, Jerry played his trump card and waited for the ceiling mirror to crash on to their table.

  “There’s a story that you people had some local Russian Embassy link,” he said easily, straight at Lizzie. “That ring a bell at all, sport? Any Reds under your bed at all, if I may ask?”

  Having resumed his eating, Tiu was taking care of his rice, holding the bowl under his chin and shovelling it non-stop; but this time, significantly, Lizzie didn’t give him half a glance.

  “Russians?” she repeated, puzzled. “Why on earth should Russians come to us? They had regular Aeroflot flights in and out of Vientiane every week.”

  Though he would have sworn, then or later, that she was telling the truth, Jerry acted not quite satisfied. “Not even local runs?” he insisted. “Fetching and carrying, courier service, or whatever?”

  “Never. How could we? Besides, the Chinese simply loathe the Russians, don’t they, Mr. Tiu?”

  “Russians pretty bad people, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu agreed. “They stink pretty bad.”

  So do you, thought Jerry, catching a fresh waft of that early wife’s body-water.

  Jerry laughed at his own absurdity. “I’ve got editors like other people have stomach-ache,” he protested. “He’s convinced we can do a Red-under-the-bed job. ‘Ricardo’s Soviet paymasters’ . . . ‘Did Ricardo take a dive for the Kremlin?’ ”

  “Paymaster?” Lizzie repeated, utterly mystified. “Ric never received a penny from the Russians. What are they talking about?”

  Jerry again: “But Indocharter did, didn’t they? Unless my lords and masters have been sold a total pup, which I suspect they have been, as usual. They drew money from the local Russian Embassy and piped it down to Hong Kong in U.S. dollars. That’s London’s story and they’re sticking to it.”

  “They’re mad,” she said confidently. “I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

  To Jerry she seemed even relieved that the conversation had taken this improbable course. Ricardo alive—there she was drifting through a minefield. Ko as her lover—that secret was Ko’s or Tiu’s to dispense, not hers. But Russian money—Jerry was as certain as he dared be that she knew nothing and feared nothing about it.

  He offered to ride back with her to Star Heights, but Mr. Tiu lived that way, she said.

  “See you again p
retty soon, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu promised.

  “Look forward to it, sport,” said Jerry.

  “You wanna stick to horse-writing, hear that? In my opinion, you get more money that way, Mr. Wessby, okay?” There was no menace in his voice or in the friendly way he patted Jerry’s upper arm. Tiu did not even speak as if he expected his advice to be taken as any more than a confidence between friends.

  Then suddenly it was over. Lizzie kissed the headwaiter, but not Jerry. She sent Jerry, not Tiu, for her coat, so that she wouldn’t be alone with him. She scarcely looked at him as she said goodbye.

  Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category.

  Wandering home through the moonlit streets—the long trek, beggars, eyes in doorways notwithstanding—Jerry subjected Craw’s dictum to closer scrutiny. On “criminal” he really couldn’t rule at all: “criminal” seemed a pretty variable sort of standard at the best of times, and neither the Circus nor its agents existed to uphold some parochial concept of the law. Craw had told him that in slump periods Ricardo had made her carry little parcels for him over frontiers. Big deal. Leave it to the owls. “Known” criminal, however, was quite a different matter. “Known” he would go along with absolutely. Remembering Elizabeth Worthington’s caged stare at Tiu, he reckoned he had known that face, that look, and that dependence in one guise or another for the bulk of his waking life.

  It has been whispered once or twice by certain trivial critics of George Smiley that at this juncture he should somehow have seen which way the wind was blowing with Jerry, and hauled him out of the field. Effectively, Smiley was Jerry’s case officer, after all. Smiley alone kept Jerry’s file, welfared and briefed him. Had George been at his peak, they say, instead of half-way down the other side, he would have read the warning signals between the lines of Craw’s reports and headed Jerry off in time. They might just as well have complained that he was a second-rate fortune-teller. The facts, as they came to Smiley, are these.