The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  They got out of the car again. Refugees trundled buffaloes and handcarts and one another, while they screamed at their pigs and children. One old woman screamed at the girl’s camera, thinking the lens was a gun barrel. There were sounds Jerry couldn’t place, like the ringing of bicycle bells and wailing, and sounds he could, like the drenched sobs of the dying and the clump of approaching mortar fire. Keller was running beside a lorry, trying to find an English-speaking officer; Jerry loped beside him yelling the same questions in French.

  “Ah, to hell,” said Keller, suddenly bored. “Let’s go home.” His English lordling’s voice: “The people and the noise,” he explained. They returned to the Mercedes.

  For a while they were stuck in the column, with the lorries cutting them to the side and the refugees politely tapping at the window asking for a ride. Once Jerry thought he saw Deathwish the Hun riding pillion on an army motor-bike. At the next fork Keller ordered the driver to turn left.

  “More private,” he said, and put his good hand back on the girl’s knee. But Jerry was thinking of Frost in the mortuary, and the whiteness of his screaming jaw.

  “My old mother always told me,” Keller declared in a folksy drawl, “Son, don’t never go back through the jungle the same way as you came. Hon?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hon, you just lost your cherry. My humble congratulations.” The hand slipped a little higher.

  From all round them came the sound of pouring water like so many burst pipes as a sudden torrent of rain fell. They passed a settlement full of chickens running in a flurry. A barber’s chair stood empty in the rain. Jerry turned to Keller.

  “This siege economy thing,” he resumed as they settled to one another again. “Market forces and so forth. You reckon that story will go?”

  “Could do,” said Keller airily. “It’s been done a few times. But it travels.”

  “Who are the main operators?”

  Keller named a few.

  “Indocharter?”

  “Indocharter’s one,” said Keller.

  Jerry took a long shot: “There’s a clown called Charlie Marshall flies for them, half Chinese. Somebody said he’d talk. Met him?”

  “Nope.”

  He reckoned that was far enough: “What do most of them use for machines?”

  “Whatever they can get. DC-4s, you name it. One’s not enough. You need two at least—fly one, cannibalise the second for parts. Cheaper to ground a plane and strip it than bribe the customs to release the spares.”

  “What’s the profit?”

  “Unprintable.”

  “Much opium around?”

  “There’s a whole damn refinery out on the Bassac, for Christ’s sakes. Looks like something out of Prohibition times. I can arrange a tour if that’s what you’re after.”

  The girl Lorraine was at the window, staring at the rain. “I don’t see any kids, Max,” she announced. “You said to look out for no kids, that’s all. Well, I’ve been watching and they’ve disappeared.” The driver stopped the car. “It’s raining, and I read somewhere that when it rains Asian kids like to come out and play. So, you know, where’s the kids?” she said, but Jerry wasn’t listening to what she’d read. Ducking and peering through the windscreen all at once, he saw what the driver saw, and it made his throat dry.

  “You’re the boss, sport,” he said to Keller quietly. “Your car, your war, and your girl.”

  In the mirror, to his pain, Jerry watched Keller’s pumice-stone face torn between experience and incapacity.

  “Drive at them slowly,” Jerry said, when he could wait no longer. “Lentement.”

  “That’s right,” Keller said. “Do that.”

  Fifty yards ahead of them, shrouded by the teeming rain, a grey lorry had pulled broadside across the track, blocking it. In the mirror, a second had pulled out behind them, blocking their retreat.

  “Better show our hands,” said Keller in a hoarse rush. With his good one he wound down his window. The girl and Jerry did the same. Jerry wiped the windscreen clear of mist and put his hands on the console. The driver held the wheel at the top.

  “Don’t smile at them, don’t speak to them,” Jerry ordered.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Keller. “Holy God.”

  All over Asia, thought Jerry, pressmen had their favourite stories of what the Khmer Rouge did to you, and most of them were true. Even Frost at this moment would have been grateful for his relatively peaceful end. He knew newsmen who carried poison, or a concealed gun, to save themselves from just this moment. If you’re caught, the first night is the only night to get out, he remembered: before they take your shoes, and your health, and God knows what other parts of you. The first night is your only chance, said the folklore. He wondered whether he should repeat it for the girl, but he didn’t want to hurt Keller’s feelings.

  The Mercedes was ploughing forward in first gear, engine whining. The rain was flying all over the car, thundering on the roof, smacking the bonnet, and darting through the open windows. If we bog down, we’re finished, Jerry thought. Still the lorry ahead had not moved and it was no more than fifteen yards away, a glistening monster in the downpour. In the dark of the lorry’s cab they saw thin faces watching them. At the last minute it lurched backward into the foliage, leaving just enough room to pass. The Mercedes tilted. Jerry had to hold the door pillar to stop himself rolling onto the driver. The two offside wheels skidded and whined, the bonnet swung and all but lurched onto the fender of the lorry.

  “No licence plates,” Keller breathed. “Holy Christ.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Jerry warned the driver. “Toujours lentement. Don’t put on your lights.” He was watching in the mirror.

  “And those were the black pyjamas?” the girl said excitedly. “And you wouldn’t even let me take a picture?”

  No one spoke.

  “What did they want? Who are they trying to ambush?” she insisted.

  “Somebody else,” said Jerry. “Not us.”

  “Some bum following us,” said Keller. “Who cares?”

  “Shouldn’t we warn someone?”

  “There isn’t the apparatus,” said Keller.

  They heard shooting behind them but they kept going.

  “Fucking rain,” Keller breathed, half to himself. “Why the hell do we get rain suddenly?”

  It had all but stopped.

  “But Christ, Max,” the girl protested, “if they’ve got us pinned out on the floor like this, why don’t they just finish us off?”

  Before Keller could reply, the driver did it for him in French, softly and politely, though only Jerry understood.

  “When they want to come, they will come,” he said, smiling at her in the mirror. “In the bad weather. While the Americans are adding another five metres of concrete to the Embassy roof, and the soldiers are crouching in capes under their trees, and the journalists are drinking whisky, and the generals are at the opium houses, the Khmer Rouge will come out of the jungle and cut our throats.”

  “What did he say?” Keller demanded. “Translate that, Westerby.”

  “Yeah, what was all that?” said the girl. “It sounded really great. Like a proposition or something.”

  “Didn’t quite get it actually, sport. Sort of outgunned me.”

  They all broke out laughing, too loud, the driver as well.

  And all through it, Jerry realised, he had thought of nobody but Lizzie. Not to the exclusion of danger—quite the contrary. Like the new, glorious sunshine which suddenly engulfed them, she was the prize of his survival.

  At Le Phnom, the same sun was beating gaily on the poolside. There had been no rain in the town, but a bad rocket near the girls’ school had killed eight or nine children. The Southern stringer had that moment returned from counting them.

  “So how did Maxie make out at the bang-bangs?” he asked Jerry as they met in the hall. “Seems to me like his nerve is creaking at the joints a little these days.”

  “Take your gr
inning little face out of my sight,” Jerry advised. “Otherwise actually I’ll smack it.” Still grinning, the Southerner departed.

  “We could meet tomorrow,” the girl said to Jerry. “Tomorrow’s free all day.”

  Behind her, Keller was making his way slowly up the stairs, a hunched figure in a one-sleeved shirt, pulling himself by the bannister rail.

  “We could even meet tonight, if you wanted,” Lorraine said.

  For a while, Jerry sat alone in his room writing postcards for Cat. Then he set course for Max’s bureau. He had a few more questions about Charlie Marshall; and besides, he had a notion old Max would appreciate his company.

  His duty done, he took a cyclo and rode up to Charlie Marshall’s house again, and though he pummelled on the door and yelled, all he could see was the same bare brown legs motionless at the bottom of the stairs, this time by candle-light. But the page torn from his notebook had disappeared.

  He returned to the town and, still with an hour to kill, settled at a pavement café in one of a hundred empty chairs and drank a long Pernod, remembering how once the girls of the town had ticked past him here on their little wicker carriages, whispering clichés of love in singsong French. Tonight the darkness trembled to nothing more lovely than the thud of occasional gun-fire, while the town huddled, waiting for the blow.

  Yet it was not the shelling but the silence that held the greatest fear. Like the jungle itself, silence, not gun-fire, was the natural element of the approaching enemy.

  When a diplomat wants to talk, the first thing he thinks of is food, and in diplomatic circles one dined early because of the curfew. Not that diplomats were subject to such rigours, but it is a charming arrogance of diplomats the world over to suppose they set an example—to whom, or of what, the devil himself will never know. The Counsellor’s house was in a flat, leafy enclave bordering Lon Nol’s palace. In the driveway as Jerry arrived, an official limousine was emptying its occupants, watched over by a jeep stiff with militia. It’s either royalty or religion, Jerry thought as he got out; but it was no more than a senior American diplomat and his wife arriving for a meal.

  “Ah. You must be Mr. Westerby,” said his hostess.

  She was tall and Harrods and amused by the idea of a journalist, as she was amused by anyone who was not a diplomat, and of counsellor rank at that. “John has been dying to meet you,” she declared brightly, and Jerry supposed she was putting him at his ease. He followed the trail upstairs. His host stood at the top, a wiry man with a moustache and a stoop and a boyishness which Jerry more usually associated with the clergy.

  “Oh, well done! Smashing. You’re the cricketer. Well done. Mutual friends, right? We’re not allowed to use the balcony tonight, I’m afraid,” he said, with a naughty glance toward the American corner. “Good men are too scarce, apparently. Got to stay under cover. Seen where you are?” He stabbed a commanding finger at a leather-framed placement chart showing the seating arrangement. “Come and meet some people. Just a minute.” He drew him slightly aside, but only slightly. “It all goes through me, right? I’ve made that absolutely clear. Don’t let them get you into a corner, right? Quite a little squall running, if you follow me. Local thing. Not your problem.”

  The senior American appeared at first sight small, being dark and tidy, but when he stood to shake Jerry’s hand, he was nearly Jerry’s height. He wore a tartan jacket of raw silk and he held a walkie-talkie radio in a black plastic case. His brown eyes were intelligent but over-respectful, and as they shook hands, a voice inside Jerry said “Cousin.”

  “Glad to know you, Mr. Westerby. I understand you’re from Hong Kong. Your Governor there is a very good friend of mine. Beckie, this is Mr. Westerby, a friend of the Governor of Hong Kong and a good friend of John, our host.”

  He indicated a large woman bridled in dull hand-beaten silver from the market. Her bright clothes flowed in an Asian medley.

  “Oh, Mr. Westerby,” she said. “From Hong Kong. Hello.”

  The remaining guests were a mixed bag of local traders. Their womenfolk were Eurasian, French, and Corsican. A houseboy hit a silver gong. The dining-room ceiling was concrete, but as they trooped in Jerry saw several eyes lift to make sure. A silver card holder told him he was “The Honourable G. Westerby,” a silver menu holder promised him le roast beef à l’anglaise, silver candle-sticks held long candles of a devotional kind, Cambodian boys flitted and backed at the half-crouch with trays of food cooked this morning while the electricity was on. A much travelled French beauty sat to Jerry’s right with a lace handkerchief between her breasts. She held another in her hand, and each time she ate or drank she dusted her little mouth. Her name card called her Countess Sylvia.

  “Je suis très, très diplomée,” she whispered to Jerry as she pecked and dabbed. “J’ai fait la science politique, mécanique, et l’électricité générale. In January I have a bad heart. Now I recover.”

  “Ah, well now, me, I’m not qualified at anything,” Jerry insisted, making far too much of a joke of it. “Jack of all trades, master of none, that’s us.” To put this into French took him quite some while, and he was still labouring at it when from somewhere fairly close a burst of machine-gun fire sounded, far too long for the health of the gun. There were no answering shots. The conversation hung.

  “Some bloody idiot shooting at the geckos, I should think,” said the Counsellor, and his wife laughed at him fondly down the table, as if the war were a little side-show they had laid on between them for their guests. The silence returned, more pregnant than before. The little Countess put her fork on her plate and it clanged like a tram in the night.

  “Dieu,” she said.

  At once, everyone started talking. The American wife asked Jerry where he was raised, and when they had been through that she asked him where his home was, so Jerry gave Thurloe Square, old Pet’s place, because he didn’t feel like talking about Tuscany.

  “We own land in Vermont,” she said firmly. “But we haven’t built on it yet.”

  Two rockets fell at the same time. Jerry reckoned they were east about half a mile. Glancing round to see whether the windows were closed, Jerry caught the brown gaze of the American husband fixed on him with mysterious urgency.

  “You have plans for tomorrow, Mr. Westerby?” he asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “If there’s anything we can do, let me know.”

  “Thanks,” said Jerry, but he had the feeling that wasn’t the point of the question.

  A Swiss trader with a wise face had a funny story. He used Jerry’s presence to repeat it.

  “Some time back, the whole town was alight with shooting, Mr. Westerby,” he said. “We were all going to die. Oh, definitely. Tonight we die! Everything—shells, tracer—poured into the sky, one million dollars’ worth of ammunition, we heard afterwards. Hours on end. Some of my friends went round shaking hands with one another.” An army of black ants emerged from under the table and began marching in single column across the perfectly laundered damask cloth, making a careful detour round the silver candle-sticks and the silver flower bowl brimming with hibiscus. “The Americans radioed around, hopped up and down, we all considered very carefully our position on the evacuation list, but a funny thing, you know: the telephones were working and we even had electricity. What did the target turn out to be?” The others were already laughing hysterically. “Frogs! Some very greedy frogs!”

  “Toads,” somebody corrected him, but it didn’t stop the laughter.

  The American diplomat, a model of courteous self-criticism, supplied the amusing epilogue.

  “The Cambodians have an old superstition, Mr. Westerby,” he said. “When there’s an eclipse of the moon, you must make a lot of noise. You must shoot off fireworks, you must bang tin cans, or, best still, fire off a million dollars’ worth of ordnance. Because if you don’t—why, the frogs will gobble up the moon. We should have known, but we didn’t know, and in consequence we were made to look very, very sill
y indeed,” he said proudly.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you boobed there, old boy,” the Counsellor said with satisfaction.

  But though the American’s smile remained frank and open his eyes continued to impart something far more pressing—such as a message between professionals.

  Someone talked about servants and their amazing fatalism. An isolated detonation, loud and seemingly quite near, ended the performance. As the Countess Sylvia reached for Jerry’s hand, their hostess smiled interrogatively at her husband down the table.

  “John, darling,” she asked in her most hospitable voice, “was that incoming or outgoing?”

  “Outgoing,” he replied, with a laugh. “Oh, outgoing definitely. Ask our journalist friend if you don’t believe me. He’s been through a few wars, haven’t you, Westerby?”

  At which the silence, yet again, joined them like a forbidden topic. The American lady clung to that piece of land in Vermont: perhaps, after all, they should build on it. Perhaps, after all, it was time.

  “Maybe we should just write to that architect,” she said. “Maybe we should,” her husband agreed, and at that moment they were flung into a pitched battle. From very close a prolonged burst of pom-poms lit the washing in the courtyard and a cluster of machine-guns—as many as twenty—crackled in a sustained and desperate fire. By the flashes they saw the servants scurry into the house, and over the firing they heard orders given and replied to, scream for scream, and the crazy ringing of handgongs.

  Inside the room, nobody moved except the American diplomat, who lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips, drew out the aerial, and murmured something before putting it to his ear. Jerry glanced downward and saw the Countess’s hand battened trustingly to his own. Her cheek brushed his shoulder. The firing faltered. He heard the clump of a small bomb close. No vibration, but the flames of the candles tilted in salute and on the mantelshelf a couple of heavy invitation cards flopped over with a slap and lay still, the only recognisable casualties. Then as a last and separate sound, they heard the grizzle of a departing single-engined plane like the distant grousing of a child.