The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  The shelling had stopped, leaving the night to the geckos. Jerry remembered that Cambodians liked to gamble on the number of times they cheeped: tomorrow will be a lucky day; tomorrow won’t; tomorrow I will take a bride; no, the day after. The girls were very young and they must have been waiting for the customers to send for them. At the rush door they hesitated and stared unhappily back at him. Jerry signalled and they began pulling aside layers of matting until a pale light gleamed onto the balcony, no stronger than a candle. He stepped inside, keeping the girls ahead of him.

  The room must once have been the master bedroom, with a second, smaller room connecting. He had his hand on the shoulder of one girl. The other followed submissively. Twelve customers lay in the first room, all men. A few girls lay between them, whispering. Barefooted coolies ministered, moving with great deliberation from one recumbent body to the next, threading a pellet onto the needle, lighting it and holding it across the bowl of the pipe while the customer took a long steady draught and the pellet burned itself out. The conversation was slow and murmured and intimate, broken by soft ripples of grateful laughter. Jerry recognised the wise Swiss from the Counsellor’s dinner party. He was chatting to a fat Cambodian. No one was interested in Jerry; like the orchids he carried at Lizzie Worthington’s apartment block, the girls authenticated him.

  “Charlie Marshall,” Jerry said quietly. A coolie pointed to the next room. Jerry dismissed the two girls and they slipped away. The second room was smaller and Charlie Marshall lay in the corner, while a Chinese girl in an elaborate cheongsam crouched over him preparing his pipe. Jerry supposed she was the daughter of the house and that Charlie Marshall was getting the grand treatment because he was both an habitué and a supplier. He knelt the other side of him. An old man was watching from the doorway. The girl watched also, the pipe still in her hands.

  “What you want, Voltaire? Why don’t you leave me be?”

  “Just a little stroll, sport. Then you can come back.”

  Taking his arm, Jerry lifted him gently to his feet, while the girl helped.

  “How much has he had?” he asked the girl. She held up three fingers.

  “And how much does he like?” he asked.

  She lowered her head, smiling. A whole lot more, she was saying.

  Charlie Marshall walked shakily at first, but by the time they reached the balcony he was prepared to argue, so Jerry lifted him up and carried him across his body like a fire victim, down the wooden steps and across the courtyard. The old man bowed them obligingly through the front door, a grinning coolie held the gate onto the street, and both were clearly very thankful to Jerry for showing so much tact. They had gone perhaps fifty yards when a pair of Chinese boys came rushing down the road at them, yelling and waving sticks like small paddles. Setting Charlie Marshall upright but holding him firmly with his left hand, Jerry let the first boy strike, deflected the paddle, then hit him at half strength with a two-knuckle punch just below the eye. The boy ran away, his friend after him. Still clutching Charlie Marshall, Jerry walked him till they came to the river and a heavy patch of darkness. Then he sat him down on the bank like a puppet in the sloped, dry grass.

  “You gonna blow my brains out, Voltaire?”

  “We’re going to have to leave that to the opium, sport,” said Jerry.

  Jerry liked Charlie Marshall, and in a perfect world he would have been glad to spend an evening with him at the fumerie and hear the story of his wretched but extraordinary life. But now his fist grasped Charlie Marshall’s tiny arm remorselessly lest he took it into his hollow head to bolt; for he had a feeling Charlie could run very fast when he became desperate. He half lay therefore, much as he had lounged among the magic mountain of possessions in old Pet’s place, on his left haunch and his left elbow, holding Charlie Marshall’s wrist into the mud, while Charlie Marshall lay flat on his back. From the river thirty feet below them came the murmured chant of the sampans as they drifted like long leaves across the golden moon path. From the sky—now in front of them, now behind—came the occasional ragged flashes of outgoing gun-fire as some bored battery commander decided to justify his existence. And sometimes from much nearer came the lighter, sharper snap as the Khmer Rouge replied, but only as tiny interludes between the racket of the geckos and the greater silence just beyond. By the moonlight Jerry looked at his watch, then at the crazed face, trying to calculate the strength of Charlie Marshall’s cravings. If Charlie was a night smoker and slept in the mornings, then his needs must come on fast. The wet on his face was already unearthly. It flowed from the heavy pores and from the stretched eyes, and from the sniffing, weeping nose. It channelled itself meticulously along the engraved creases, making neat reservoirs in the caverns.

  “Jesus, Voltaire. Ricardo’s my friend. He got a lot of philosophy, that guy. You want to hear him talk, Voltaire. You wanna hear his ideas.”

  “Yes,” Jerry agreed. “I do.”

  Charlie Marshall grabbed hold of Jerry’s hand.

  “Voltaire, these are good guys, hear me? Mr. Tiu . . . Drake Ko. They don’t want to hurt nobody. They wanna do business. They got something to sell, they got people buying it! It’s a service! Nobody gets his rice-bowl broken. Why you want to screw that up? You’re a nice guy yourself. I saw. You carry the old boy’s pig, okay? Whoever saw a round-eye carry a slant-eye pig before? But Jesus, Voltaire, you screw it out of me, they will kill you very completely, because that Mr. Tiu, he’s a business-like and very philosophical gentleman, hear me? They kill me, they kill Ricardo, they kill you, they kill the whole damn human race!”

  The artillery fired a barrage, and this time the jungle replied with a small salvo of missiles, perhaps six, which hissed over their heads like whirring boulders from a catapult. Moments later they heard the detonations somewhere in the centre of the town. After them, nothing. Not the wail of a fire engine, not the siren of an ambulance.

  “Why would they kill Ricardo?” Jerry asked. “What’s Ricardo done wrong?”

  “Voltaire! Ricardo’s my friend! Drake Ko my father’s friend! Those old men big brothers. They fight some lousy war together in Shanghai about two hundred and fifty years ago, okay? I go see my father. I tell him, ‘Father you gotta love me once. You gotta quit calling me your spider bastard, and you gotta tell your good friend Drake Ko to take the heat off Ricardo. You gotta say, “Drake Ko, that Ricardo and my Charlie, they are like you and me. They brothers, same as us. They learn fly together in Oklahoma, they kill the human race together. And they some pretty good friends. And that’s a fact.” ’ My father hate me very bad, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But he send Drake Ko a damn long personal message all the same.”

  Charlie Marshall breathed in, on and on, as if his little breast could scarcely hold enough air to feed him. “That Lizzie. She some woman. Lizzie, she go personally to Drake Ko herself. Also on a very private basis. And she say to him, ‘Mr. Ko, you gotta take the heat off Ric.’ That’s a very delicate situation there, Voltaire. We all got to hold on to each other tight or we fall off the crazy mountaintop, hear me? Voltaire, let me go. I beg! I completely beg, for Christ’s sake, je m’abîme, hear me? That’s all I know!”

  Watching him, listening to his wracked outbursts, how he collapsed and rallied and broke again and rallied less, Jerry felt he was witnessing the last martyred writhing of a friend. His instinct was to lead Charlie slowly and let him ramble. His dilemma was that he didn’t know how much time he had before whatever happens to an addict happened. He asked questions, but often Charlie didn’t seem to hear them. At other times he appeared to answer questions Jerry hadn’t put. And sometimes a delayed-action mechanism threw out an answer to a question which Jerry had long abandoned. At Sarratt the inquisitors said a broken man was dangerous because he paid you money he didn’t have in order to buy your love. But for whole precious minutes Charlie could pay nothing at all.

  “Drake Ko never went to Vientiane in his life!” Charlie yelled suddenly. “You
crazy, Voltaire! A big guy like Ko bothering with a dirty little Asian town? Drake Ko some philosopher, Voltaire! You wanna watch that guy pretty careful!” Everyone, it seemed, was some philosopher—or everyone but Charlie Marshall. “In Vientiane nobody even heard Ko’s name! Hear me, Voltaire?”

  At another point, Charlie Marshall wept and seized Jerry’s hands and enquired between sobs whether Jerry also had a father.

  “Yes, sport, I did,” said Jerry patiently. “And in his way he was a general too.”

  Over the river two white flares shed an amazing daylight, inspiring Charlie to reminisce on the hardships of their early days together in Vientiane. Sitting bolt upright, he drew a house in diagram in the mud. That’s where Lizzie and Ric and Charlie Marshall lived, he said proudly: in a stinking flea-hut on the edge of town, a place so lousy even the geckos got sick from it. Ric and Lizzie had the royal suite, which was the only room this fleahut contained, and Charlie’s job was to keep out of the way and pay the rent and fetch the booze. But the memory of their dreadful economic plight moved Charlie to a fresh storm of tears.

  “So what did you live on, sport?” Jerry asked, expecting nothing from the question. “Come on. It’s over now. What did you live on?”

  More tears while Charlie confessed to a monthly allowance from his father, whom he loved and revered.

  “That crazy Lizzie,” said Charlie through his grief, “that crazy Lizzie, she make trips to Hong Kong for Mellon.”

  Somehow Jerry contrived to keep himself steady in order not to shake Charlie from his course: “Mellon? Who’s this Mellon?” he asked. But the soft tone made Charlie sleepy, and he started playing with the mud house, adding a chimney and smoke.

  “Come on, damn you! Mellon! Mellon!” Jerry shouted straight into Charlie’s face, trying to shock him into replying. “Mellon, you hashed-out wreck! Trips to Hong Kong!” Lifting Charlie to his feet, he shook him like a rag doll, but it took a lot more shaking to produce the answer, and in the course of it Charlie Marshall implored Jerry to understand what it was like to love, really to love, a crazy round-eye hooker and know you could never have her, even for a night.

  Mellon was a creepy English trader, nobody knew what he did. A little of this, a little of that, Charlie said. People were scared of him. Mellon said he could get Lizzie into the big-time heroin trail. “With your passport and your body,” Mellon had told her, “you can go in and out of Hong Kong like a princess.”

  Exhausted, Charlie sank to the ground and crouched before his mud house. Squatting beside him, Jerry fastened his fist to the back of Charlie’s collar, careful not to hurt him.

  “So she did that for him, did she, Charlie? Lizzie carried for Mellon.” With his palm, he gently tipped Charlie’s head round till his lost eyes were staring straight at him.

  “Lizzie don’t carry for Mellon, Voltaire,” Charlie corrected him. “Lizzie carry for Ricardo. Lizzie don’t love Mellon. She love Ric and me.”

  Staring glumly at the mud house, Charlie burst suddenly into raucous dirty laughter, which then petered out with no explanation.

  “You louse it up, Lizzie!” Charlie called teasingly, poking a finger into the mud door. “You louse it up as usual, honey! You talk too much. Why you tell everyone you Queen of England? Why you tell everyone you some great spook-lady? Mellon get very very mad with you, Lizzie. Mellon throw you out, right out on your ass. Ric got pretty mad too, remember? Ric smash you up real bad and Charlie have to take you to the doctor in the middle of the damn night, remember? You got one hell of a big mouth, Lizzie, hear me? You my sister, but you got the biggest damn mouth ever!”

  Till Ricardo closed it for her, Jerry thought, remembering the grooves on her chin. Because she spoiled the deal with Mellon.

  Still crouching at Charlie’s side and clutching him by the scruff, Jerry watched the world around him vanish, and in place of it he saw Sam Collins sitting in his car below Star Heights, with a clear view of the eighth floor, while he studied the racing page of the newspaper at eleven o’clock at night. Not even the clump of a rocket falling quite close could distract him from that freezing vision. And he heard Craw’s voice above the mortar fire, intoning on the subject of Lizzie’s criminality. When funds were low, Craw had said, Ricardo had made her carry little parcels across frontiers for him.

  And how did London town learn that, Your Grace—Jerry would have liked to ask old Craw—if not from Sam Collins alias Mellon himself?

  A three-second rainstorm had washed away Charlie’s mud house and he was furious about it. He was splashing around on all fours looking for it, weeping and cursing frantically. The fit passed and he started talking about his father again, and how the old man had found employment for his natural son with a certain distinguished Vientiane airline—though Charlie till then had been quite keen to get out of flying for good on account of losing his nerve.

  One day, it seemed, the General just lost patience with Charlie. He called together his bodyguard and came down from his hilltop in the Shans to a little opium town called Fang, not far inside the Thai border. There, after the fashion of patriarchs the world over, the General rebuked Charlie for his spendthrift ways.

  Charlie had a special squawk for his father and a special way of puffing out his wasted cheeks in military disapproval.

  “ ‘So you better do some proper damn work, for a change—hear me, you kwailo spider bastard? You better stay away from horse gambling, hear me, and strong liquor, and opium. And you better take those Commie stars off your tits and sack that stink friend Ricardo of yours. And you better cease financing his woman, hear me? Because I don’t gonna keep you one day more, not one hour, you spider bastard, and I hate you so much one day I kill you because you remind me of that Corsican whore your mother!’ ”

  Then to the job itself—Charlie’s father, the General, still speaking: “ ‘Certain very fine Chiu Chow gentlemen who are pretty good friends of pretty good friends of mine, hear me, happen to have a controlling interest in a certain aviation company. Also I got certain shares in that company. Also this company happens to bear the distinguished title of Indocharter Aviation. So these good friends, they do me a favour to assist me in my disgrace for my three-legged spider-bastard son and I pray sincerely you may fall out of the sky and break your kwailo neck.’ ”

  So Charlie flew his father’s opium for Indocharter—one, two flights a week at first, but regular, honest work and he liked it. His nerve came back, he steadied down, and he felt real gratitude toward his old man. He tried, of course, to get the Chiu Chow boys to take Ricardo too, but they wouldn’t. After a few months they did agree to pay Lizzie twenty bucks a week to sit in the front office and sweet-mouth the clients. These were the golden days, Charlie implied. Charlie and Lizzie earned the money, Ricardo wasted it on ever crazier enterprises, everybody was happy, everybody was employed.

  Till one evening, like a nemesis, Tiu appeared and screwed the whole thing up. He appeared just as they were locking up the company’s offices, straight off the pavement without an appointment, asking for Charlie Marshall by name and describing himself as part of the company’s Bangkok management. The Chiu Chow boys came out of the back office, took one look at Tiu, vouched for his good faith, and made themselves scarce.

  Charlie broke off in order to weep on Jerry’s shoulder.

  “Now listen to me carefully, sport,” Jerry urged. “Listen. This is the bit I like, okay? You tell me this bit carefully and I’ll take you home. Promise. Please.”

  But Jerry had it wrong. It was no longer a matter of making Charlie talk. Jerry was now the drug on which Charlie Marshall depended. It was no longer a matter of holding him down, either. Charlie Marshall clutched Jerry’s breast as if it were the last raft on his lonely sea, and their conversation had become a desperate monologue from which Jerry stole his facts while Charlie Marshall cringed and begged and howled for his tormentor’s attention, making jokes and laughing at them through his tears. Downriver one of Lon Nol’s machine-guns which had not
yet been sold to the Khmer Rouge was firing tracer into the jungle by the light of another flare. Long golden bolts flowed in streams above and below the water, and lit a small cave where they disappeared into the trees.

  Charlie’s sweat-soaked hair was pricking Jerry’s chin and Charlie was gabbling and dribbling all at the same time.

  “Mr. Tiu don’t wanna talk in no office, Voltaire. Oh, no! Mr. Tiu don’t dress too good, either. Tiu very Chiu Chow person, he use Thai passport like Drake Ko, he use crazy name and keep very very low appearance when he come to Vientiane. ‘Captain Marshall,’ he say to me, ‘how you like earn a lot of extra cash by performing certain interesting and varied work outside the company’s hours, tell me? How you like fly a certain unconventional journey for me once? They tell me you some pretty damn fine pilot these days, very steady. How you like earn yourself not less than maybe four to five thousand U.S. for one day’s work, not even a whole day? How would that personally attract you, Captain Marshall?’ ‘Mr. Tiu,’ I tell him”—Charlie is shouting hysterically now—“ ‘without in any way prejudicing my negotiating position, Mr. Tiu, for five thousand bucks U.S. in my present serene mood I go down to hell for you and I bring you the devil’s balls back!’ Tiu say he come back one day and I gotta keep my damn mouth shut.”

  Suddenly Charlie had changed to his father’s voice, and he was calling himself a spider bastard and the son of a Corsican whore— till gradually it dawned on Jerry that Charlie was describing the next episode in the story.

  Amazingly, it turned out, Charlie had kept to himself the secret of Tiu’s offer until he next saw his father, this time in Chiang Mai for a celebration of the Chinese New Year. He had not told Ric and he had not even told Lizzie—maybe because at this point they weren’t getting on too well any more, and Ric was having himself a lot of women on the side.