The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  At the Oriental he tipped the porter and arranged to collect messages and use the telephone, and best of all he obtained a receipt for two nights’ lodging with which to taunt Stubbs. But his trail round the hotels had scared him, he felt exposed and at risk, so to sleep, for a dollar a night, he took a prepaid room in a nameless backstreet doss-house where the formalities of registration were dispensed with: a place like a row of beach huts, with all the room doors opening straight on to the pavement in order to make fornication easier, and open garages with plastic curtains that screened the number of your car.

  By the evening he was reduced to stomping the air-freight agencies, asking about a firm called Indocharter, though he wasn’t too keen to do that either, and he was seriously wondering whether to believe the Air Vietnam hostess and take up the trail in Saigon, when a Chinese girl in one of the agencies said, “Indocharter? That’s Captain Marshall’s line.”

  She directed him to a bookshop where Charlie Marshall bought his literature and collected his mail whenever he was in town. The shop was also run by Chinese, and when Jerry mentioned Marshall the old proprietor burst out laughing and said Charlie hadn’t been in for months. The old man was very small, with false teeth that grimaced.

  “He owe you money? Charlie Marshall owe you money, clash a plane for you?” He once more hooted with laughter and Jerry joined in.

  “Super. Great. Listen, what do you do with all the mail when he doesn’t come here? Do you send it on?”

  Charlie Marshall, he didn’t get no mail, the old man said.

  “Ah, but, sport, if a letter comes tomorrow, where will you send it?”

  To Phnom Penh, the old man said, pocketing his five dollars, and fished a scrap of paper from his desk so that Jerry could copy down the address.

  “Maybe I should buy him a book,” said Jerry, looking round. “What does he like?”

  “Flench,” the old man said automatically and, taking Jerry upstairs, showed him his sanctum for round-eye culture: for the English, pornography printed in Brussels; for the French, row after row of tattered classics—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hugo. Jerry bought a copy of Candide and slipped it into his pocket. Visitors to this room were ex officio celebrities apparently, for the old man produced a visitor’s book and Jerry signed it: “J. Westerby, newshound.” The comments column was played for laughs, so he wrote, “A most distinguished emporium.”

  Then he looked back through the pages and asked, “Charlie Marshall sign here too, sport?”

  The old man showed him Charlie Marshall’s signature a couple of times—“Address: here,” he had written.

  “How about his friend?”

  “Flend?”

  “Captain Ricardo.”

  At this the old man grew very solemn and gently took away the book.

  He went round to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the Oriental, and it was empty except for a troop of Japanese who had just returned from Cambodia. They told him the state of play there as of yesterday, and he got a little drunk. And as he was leaving, to his momentary horror, the dwarf appeared, in town for consultation with the local bureau. He had a Thai boy in tow, which made him particularly pert. “Why, Westerby! But how’s the Secret Service today?” He played this joke on pretty well everyone, but it didn’t improve Jerry’s peace of mind.

  At the doss-house he drank a lot more Scotch but the exertions of his fellow guests kept him awake. Finally, in self-defence he went out and found himself a girl, a soft little creature from a bar up the road, but when he lay alone his thoughts once more homed on Lizzie: like it or not, she was his bed companion.

  How much was she consciously involved with them? he wondered. Did she know what she was playing with when she set Jerry up for Tiu? Did she know what Drake’s boys had done to Frost? Did she know they might do it to Jerry? It even entered his mind that she had been there while they did it, and that thought appalled him. No question: Frost’s body was still very fresh in his memory. It was one of the worst.

  By two in the morning he decided he was going to have a bout of fever, he was sweating and turning so much. Once, he heard sounds of soft footsteps inside the room and flung himself into a corner, clutching a teak table-lamp ripped from its socket. At four he was woken by that amazing Asian hubbub: pig-like hawking sounds, bells, cries of old men in extremis, the crowing of a thousand roosters echoing in the tile and concrete corridors. He fought with the broken plumbing and began the laborious business of getting clean from a thin trickle of cold water. At five the radio was turned on full blast to get him out of bed, and a whine of Asian music announced that the day had begun in earnest. By then he had shaved as if it were his wedding day, and at eight he cabled his plans to the comic for the Circus to intercept.

  At eleven he caught the plane to Phnom Penh. As he climbed aboard the Air Cambodge Caravelle, the ground hostess turned her lovely face to him and, in her best lilting English, melodiously wished him a “nice fright.”

  “Thanks. Yes. Super,” he said, and chose the seat over the wing where you stood the best chance. As they slowly took off, he saw a group of fat Thais playing lousy golf on perfect links just beside the runway.

  There were eight names on the flight manifest when Jerry read it at the check-in, but only one other passenger boarded the plane, a black-clad American boy with a brief-case. The rest was cargo, stacked aft in brown gunny bags and rush boxes. A siege plane, Jerry thought automatically. You fly in with the goods, you fly out with the lucky. The stewardess offered him an old Jours de France and a barley sugar. He read the Jours de France to put some French back into his mind, then remembered Candide and read that. He had brought the book-bag, and in the book-bag he had Conrad. In Phnom Penh he always read Conrad; it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of the true Conrad river ports.

  To land, they flew in high, then pancaked in a tight uneasy spiral to avoid random small-arms fire from the jungle. There was no ground control, but Jerry hadn’t expected any. The stewardess didn’t know how close the Khmer Rouge were to the town, but the Japanese had said fifteen kilometres on all fronts and less where there were no roads. The Japanese had said the airport was under fire but only from rockets and sporadically. No 105s. Not yet, but there’s always a beginning, thought Jerry.

  Then olive earth leapt at them and Jerry saw bomb craters spattered like egg-spots, and the yellow lines from the tyre tracks of the convoys. As they landed feather-light on the pitted runway, the inevitable naked brown children splashed contentedly in a mud-filled crater.

  He stepped on to the tarmac and as the heat hit him with a slap, so did the roar of transport planes taking off and landing. Yet for all that, he had the illusion of arriving on a calm summer’s day: for in Phnom Penh, like nowhere else Jerry had ever been, war took place in an atmosphere of peace. He remembered the last time he was here, before the bombing halt. A group of Air France passengers bound for Tokyo had been dawdling curiously on the apron, not realising they had landed in a battle. No one told them to take cover, no one was with them. F-4s and 111s were screaming over the airfield, there was shooting from the perimeter, Air America choppers were landing the dead in nets like frightful catches from some red sea, and a Boeing 707, in order to take off, had to crawl across the entire airfield, running the gauntlet in slow motion. Spellbound, Jerry had watched her lollop out of range of the ground fire, and all the way he had waited for the thump that would tell him she had been hit in the tail. But she had kept going as if the innocent were immune, and disappeared into the untroubled horizon.

  Now ironically, with the end so close, he noticed that the accent was on the cargo of survival. On the farther side of the airfield huge chartered all-silver American transport planes, 707s and four-engined turbo-prop C-130s marked “Trans World,” “Bird Airways,” or not marked at all, were landing and taking off in a clumsy, dangerous shuttle as they brought the ammunition and rice in from Thailand and Saigon. On his hasty walk to the terminal Jerry saw two landings, and eac
h time held his breath waiting for the late back-charge of the jets as they fought and shivered to a halt inside the revêtement of earth-filled ammunition boxes at the soft end of the landing-strip. Even before they stopped, flight handlers in flack-jackets and helmets had converged like unarmed platoons to wrest their precious sacks from the holds.

  Yet even these bad omens could not destroy his pleasure at being back.

  “Vous restez combien de temps, Monsieur?” the immigration officer enquired.

  “Toujours, sport,” said Jerry. “Long as you’ll have me. Longer.” He thought of asking after Charlie Marshall then and there, but the airport was stiff with police and spooks of every sort, and as long as he didn’t know what he was up against it seemed wise not to advertise his interest. There was a colourful array of old aircraft with new insignia, but he couldn’t see any belonging to Indocharter, whose registered markings, Craw had told him at the valedictory briefing just before he left Hong Kong, were believed to be Ko’s racing colours: sea grey and sky blue.

  He took a taxi and rode in front, gently declining the driver’s courteous offers of girls, shows, clubs, boys. The flamboyants made a luscious arcade of orange against the slate monsoon sky. He stopped at a haberdasher to change money au cours flexible, a term he loved. The money-changers used to be Chinese, Jerry remembered. This one was Indian: the Chinese get out early, but the Indians stay to pick the carcass. Shanty towns lay left and right of the road. Refugees crouched everywhere, cooking, dozing in silent groups. A ring of small children sat passing round a cigarette.

  “Nous sommes un village avec une population des millions,” said the driver in his schoolroom French.

  An army convoy drove at them, headlights on, sticking to the centre of the road. The taxi-driver obediently pulled into the dirt. An ambulance brought up the rear, both doors open. The bodies were stacked feet outward, legs like pigs’ trotters, marbled and bruised. Dead or alive, it scarcely mattered. They passed a cluster of stilt houses smashed by rockets, and entered a provincial French square: a restaurant, an épicerie, a charcuterie, advertisements for Byrrh and Coca-Cola. On the curb, children squatted, watching over litre winebottles filled with stolen petrol. Jerry remembered that too: that was what had happened in the shellings. The shells touched off the petrol and the result was a blood-bath. It would happen again this time. Nobody learned anything, nothing changed, the offal was cleared away by morning.

  “Stop!” said Jerry and on the spur of the moment handed the driver the piece of paper on which he had written down the Bangkok bookshop’s address for Charlie Marshall. He had imagined he should creep up on the place at dead of night, but in the sunlight there seemed no point any more.

  “Y aller?” the driver asked, turning to look at him in surprise.

  “That’s it, sport.”

  “Vous connaissez cette maison?”

  “Chum of mine.”

  “A vous? Un ami à vous?”

  “Press,” said Jerry, which explains any lunacy.

  The driver shrugged and pointed the car down a long boulevard, past the French cathedral, into a mud road lined with courtyard villas which became quickly dingier as they approached the edge of town. Twice Jerry asked the driver what was special about the address, but the driver had lost his charm and shrugged away the questions. When they stopped, he insisted on being paid off, and drove away racing the gear changes in rebuke.

  It was just another villa, the lower half hidden behind a wall pierced with a wrought-iron gate. Jerry pushed the bell and heard nothing. When he tried to force the gate, it wouldn’t move. He heard a window slam and thought, as he looked quickly up, that he saw a brown face slip away behind the mosquito wire. Then the gate buzzed and yielded, and he walked up a few steps to a tiled verandah and another door, this one of solid teak with a tiny shaded grille for looking out but not in. He waited, then hammered heavily on the knocker, and heard the echoes bounding all over the house. The door was double, with a join at the centre. Pressing his face to the gap, he saw a strip of tiled floor and two steps, presumably the last two steps of a staircase. On the lower of these stood two smooth brown feet, naked, and two bare shins, but he saw no farther than the knees.

  “Hullo!” he yelled, still at the gap. “Bonjour! Hullo!” And when the legs still did not move: “Je suis un ami de Charlie Marshall! Madame, Monsieur, je suis un ami anglais de Charlie Marshall! Je veux lui parler.”

  He took out a five-dollar bill and shoved it through the gap but nothing happened, so he took it back and instead tore a piece of paper from his notebook. He headed his message “To Captain C. Marshall” and introduced himself by name as “a British journalist with a proposal to our mutual interest,” and gave the address of his hotel. Threading this note also through the gap, he looked for the brown legs again but they had vanished, so he walked till he found a cyclo, then rode in the cyclo till he found a cab: and no, thank you, no, thank you, he didn’t want a girl— except that, as usual, he did.

  The hotel used to be the Royal. Now it was Le Phnom. A flag was flying from the mast-head, but its grandeur already looked desperate. Signing himself in, he saw living flesh basking round the courtyard pool and once more thought of Lizzie. For the girls, this was the hard school, and if she’d carried little packets for Ricardo, then ten to one she’d been through it. The prettiest belonged to the richest, and the richest were Phnom Penh’s Rotarian crooks: the gold and rubber smugglers, the police chiefs, the big-fisted Corsicans who made neat deals with the Khmer Rouge in mid-battle.

  There was a letter waiting for him, the flap not sealed. The receptionist, having read it himself, politely watched Jerry do the same. A gilt-edged invitation card with an Embassy crest invited him to dinner. His host was someone he had never heard of. Mystified, he turned the card over. A scrawl on the back read “Knew your friend George of the Guardian,” and “guardian” was the word that introduced. Dinner and dead-letter boxes, he thought: what Sarratt scathingly called the great Foreign Office disconnection.

  “Téléphone?” Jerry enquired.

  “Il est foutu, Monsieur.”

  “Electricité?”

  “Aussi foutue, Monsieur, mais nous avons beaucoup de l’eau.”

  “Keller!” said Jerry with a grin.

  “Dans la cour, Monsieur.”

  He walked into the gardens. Among the flesh sat a bunch of warries from the Fleet Street Heavies, drinking Scotch and exchanging hard stories. They looked like boy pilots in the Battle of Britain fighting a borrowed war, and they watched him in collective contempt for his upper-class origins. One wore a white kerchief, and lank hair bravely tossed back.

  “Christ, it’s the Duke,” he said. “How’d you get here? Walk on the Mekong?”

  But Jerry didn’t want them, he wanted Keller. Keller was permanent. He was a wireman and he was American and Jerry knew him from other wars. More particularly, no uitlander newsman came to town without putting his cause at Keller’s feet, and if Jerry was to have credibility, then Keller’s chop would supply it, and credibility was increasingly dear to him. He found Keller in the car-park. Broad shoulders, grey-headed, one sleeve rolled down. He was standing with his sleeved arm stuffed into his pocket, watching a driver hose out the inside of a Mercedes.

  “Max. Super.”

  “Ripping,” said Keller after glancing at him, then went back to his watching. Beside him stood a pair of slim Khmer boys looking like fashion photographers, in high-heeled boots and bell-bottoms and cameras dangling over their glittering, unbuttoned shirts. As Jerry looked on, the driver stopped hosing and began scrubbing the upholstery with an army pack of lint which turned brown the more he rubbed. Another American joined the group and Jerry guessed he was Keller’s newest stringer. Keller went through stringers fairly fast.

  “What happened?” said Jerry as the driver began hosing again.

  “Two-dollar hero caught very expensive bullet,” said the stringer. “That’s what happened.” He was a pale Southerner with an air o
f being amused, and Jerry was prepared to dislike him.

  “Right, Keller?” Jerry asked.

  “Photographer,” Keller said.

  “One of Keller’s native picture-warriors,” said the Southerner, still grinning.

  Keller’s wire service ran a stable of them. All the big services did: Cambodian boys, like the couple standing here. They paid them two U.S. to go to the front and twenty for every photo printed. Jerry had heard that Keller was losing them at the rate of one a week.

  “Took it clean through the shoulder while he was running and stooping,” said the stringer. “Lost it through the lower back. Went through him like grass through a goose.” He seemed impressed.

  “Where is he?” said Jerry for something to say, while the driver continued to mop and hose and scrub.

  “Dying right up the road there. What happened, see, couple of weeks back those bastards in the New York bureau dug their toes in about medication. We used to ship them to Bangkok. Not now. Man, not now. Know something? Up the road they lie on the floor and have to bribe the nurses to take them water. Right, boys?”

  The two Cambodians smiled politely.

  “Want something, Westerby?” Keller asked.

  Keller’s face was grey and pitted. Jerry knew him best from the sixties in the Congo, where Keller had burned his hand pulling a kid out of a lorry. Now the fingers were welded like a webbed claw, but otherwise he looked the same. Jerry remembered that incident best because he had been holding the other end of the kid.

  “Comic wants me to take a look round,” Jerry said.

  “Can you still do that?”

  Jerry laughed and Keller laughed, and they drank Scotch in the bar till the car was ready, chatting about old times. At the main entrance, they picked up a girl who had been waiting all day, just for Keller, a tall Californian with too much camera and long, restless legs. As the phones weren’t working, Jerry insisted on stopping off at the British Embassy so that he could reply to his invitation.