The Honorable Schoolboy

by John le Carré

  The General’s counsel was not encouraging: “ ‘Don’t you touch that horse! That Tiu, he got some pretty highly big connections, and they all a bit too special for a crazy little spider bastard like you, hear me! Jesus Christ, who ever heard of a Swatownese give five thousand dollar to a lousy half-kwailo to improve his mind with travel!’ ”

  “So you passed the deal to Ric, right?” said Jerry quickly. “Right, Charlie? You told Tiu, ‘Sorry, but try Ricardo.’ Is that how it went?”

  But Charlie Marshall was missing—believed dead. He had fallen straight off Jerry’s chest and lay flat in the mud with his eyes closed, and only his occasional gulps for breath—greedy, rasping draughts of it—and the crazy beating of his pulse where Jerry held his wrist testified to the life inside the frame.

  “Voltaire,” Charlie whispered. “On the Bible, Voltaire. You’re a good man. Take me home. Jesus, take me home, Voltaire.”

  Stunned, Jerry stared at the prone and broken figure and knew that he had to ask one more question, even if it was the last in both their lives. Reaching down, he dragged Charlie to his feet for the last time. And there for an hour in the black road, struggling on his arm, while more aimless barrages stabbed the darkness, Charlie Marshall screamed, and begged, and swore he would love Jerry always if only he didn’t have to reveal what arrangements his friend Ricardo had made for his survival. But Jerry explained that without that, the mystery was not even half revealed. And perhaps Charlie Marshall, in his ruin and despair, as he sobbed out the forbidden secrets, understood Jerry’s reasoning: that in a city about to be given back to the jungle, there was no destruction unless it was complete.

  As gently as he could, Jerry carried Charlie Marshall down the road, back to the villa and up the steps, where the same silent faces gratefully received him. I should have got more, he thought. I should have told him more as well; I didn’t tend the two-way traffic in the way they ordered. I stayed too long with the business of Lizzie and Sam Collins. I did it upside down, I foozled my shopping list, I loused it up like Lizzie. He tried to feel sorry about that but he couldn’t, and the things he remembered best were the things that weren’t on the list at all, and they were the same things that stood up in his mind like monuments while he typed his message to dear old George.

  He typed with the door locked and the gun in his belt. There was no sign of Luke, so Jerry assumed he had gone off to a whore-house, still in his drunken sulk. It was a long signal, the longest of his career: “Know this much in case you don’t hear from me again.” He reported his contact with the Counsellor, he gave his next port of call and gave Ricardo’s address, and a portrait of Charlie Marshall and of the three-sided household in the flea-hut, but only in the most formal terms, and he left out entirely his new-found knowledge regarding the rôle played by the unsavoury Sam Collins. After all, if they knew it already what was the point of telling it to them again? He left out the placenames and the proper names and made a separate key of them, then spent another hour putting the two messages into a firstbase code that wouldn’t fool a cryptographer for five minutes, but was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and of mortals like his host the British Counsellor. He ended with a reminder to housekeepers to check whether Blatt & Rodney had made that latest money draft to Cat. He burned the en clair texts, rolled the encoded versions into a newspaper, then lay on the newspaper and dozed, the gun awkwardly at his side.

  At six he shaved, transferred his signals to a paperback novel which he felt able to part with, and took himself for a walk in the morning quiet. In the place, the Counsellor’s car was parked conspicuously. The Counsellor himself was parked equally conspicuously on the terrace of a pretty bistro, wearing a Riviera straw hat reminiscent of Craw’s, and treating himself to hot croissants and café au lait. Seeing Jerry, he gave an elaborate wave.

  Jerry wandered over to him: “Morning,” he said.

  “Ah, you’ve got it! Good man!” the Counsellor cried, bounding to his feet. “Been longing to read it ever since it came out!”

  Parting with the signal, conscious only of its omissions, Jerry had a feeling of end-of-term. He might come back, he might not, but things would never be quite the same again.

  The exact circumstances of Jerry’s departure from Phnom Penh are relevant because of Luke, later.

  For the first part of the morning that remained, Jerry pursued his obsessional search for cover, which was the natural antidote, perhaps, to his increasing sense of nakedness. Diligently he went on the stomp for refugee and orphan stories, which he filed through Keller at midday, together with a quite decent atmosphere piece on his visit to Battambang, which, though never used, has at least a place in his dossier. There were two refugee camps at that time, both blossoming, one in an enormous hotel on the Bassac, Sihanouk’s personal and unfinished dream of para-dise; one in the railway-yards near the airport, two or three families packed into each carriage. He visited both and they were the same: young Australian heroes struggling with the impossible, the only water filthy, a rice hand-out twice a week, and the children chirruping “Hi” and “Bye-bye” after him while he trailed his Cambodian interpreter up and down their lines, besieging everyone with questions, acting large, and looking for that extra something that would melt Stubbsie’s heart.

  At a travel office he noisily booked a passage to Bangkok. Making for the airport, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu. Last time I was here, I went water-skiing, he thought. The round-eye traders kept houseboats moored along the Mekong. And for a moment he saw himself—and the city—in the days when the Cambodian war still had a certain ghastly innocence: ace operator Westerby, risking mono, bouncing boyishly over the brown water of the Mekong, towed by a jolly Dutchman in a speed launch that burned enough petrol to feed a family for a week. The greatest hazard was the two-foot wave, he remembered, which rolled down the river every time the guards on the bridge let off a depth-charge to prevent the Khmer Rouge divers from blowing it up. But now the river was theirs, so was the jungle. And so, tomorrow or the next day, was the town.

  At the airport, he ditched the Walther in a rubbish bin and at the last minute bribed his way aboard a plane to Saigon, which was his destination. Taking off, he wondered who had the longer expectation of survival, himself or the city.

  * * *

  Luke, on the other hand, with the key to Deathwish the Hun’s flat nestling in his pocket, flew to Bangkok, and as luck had it he flew under Jerry’s name, since Jerry was on the flight list and Luke was not, and the remaining places were all taken. In Bangkok he attended a hasty bureau conference at which the magazine’s local manpower was carved up between various bits of the crumbling Vietnam front. Luke got Hué and Danang and accordingly left for Saigon next day, thence north by connecting midday plane.

  Contrary to later rumour, the two men did not meet in Saigon.

  Nor did they meet in the course of the northern roll-back. The last they saw of each other, in any mutual sense, was on that final evening in Phnom Penh, when Jerry had bawled Luke out and Luke had sulked: and that’s fact—a commodity which was afterwards notoriously hard to come by.

  17

  RICARDO

  At no time in the entire case did George Smiley hold the ring with such tenacity as now. In the Circus, nerves were stretched to snapping-point. The bloody inertia and the bouts of frenzy which Sarratt habitually warned against became one and the same. Each day that brought no hard news from Hong Kong was another day of disaster. Jerry’s long signal was put under the microscope and held to be ambiguous, then neurotic.

  Why had he not pressed Marshall harder? Why had he not raised the Russian spectre again? He should have grilled Charlie about the gold seam; he should have carried on where he left off with Tiu. Had he forgotten that his main job was to sow alarm and only afterwards to obtain information? As to his obsession with that wretched daughter of his—God Almighty, doesn’t the fellow know what signals cost? (They seemed to forget it was the Cousins who were footing the bill.) And what was all
this about having no more to do with British Embassy officials standing proxy for the absent Circus resident? All right, there had been a delay in the pipeline in getting the signal across from the Cousins’ side of the house. Jerry had still run Charlie Marshall to earth, hadn’t he? It was absolutely no part of a fieldman’s job to dictate the “do”s and “don’t”s to London. Housekeeping Section, who had arranged the contact, wanted him rebuked by return.

  Pressure from outside the Circus was even fiercer. Colonial Wilbraham’s faction had not been idle, and the Steering Group, in a startling about-turn, decided that the Governor of Hong Kong should after all be informed of the case, and soon. There was high talk of calling him back to London on a pretext. The panic had arisen because Ko had once more been received at Government House, this time at one of the Governor’s talk-in suppers, at which influential Chinese were invited to air their opinions off the record.

  By contrast Saul Enderby and his fellow hard-liners pulled the opposite way: “To hell with the Governor. What we want is full partnership with the Cousins immediately!” George should go to Martello today, said Enderby, and make a clean breast of the whole case and invite them to take over the last stage of development. He should stop playing hide-and-seek about Nelson, he should admit that he had no resources, he should let the Cousins compute the possible intelligence dividend for themselves, and if they brought the job off, so much the better: let them claim the credit on Capitol Hill, to the confusion of their enemies. The result of this generous and timely gesture, Enderby argued— coming bang in the middle of the Vietnam fiasco—would be an indissoluble intelligence partnership for years to come, a view which in his shifty way Lacon seemed to support. Caught in the cross-fire, Smiley suddenly found himself saddled with a double reputation. The Wilbraham set branded him as anti-Colonial and pro-American, while Enderby’s men accused him of ultraconservatism in the handling of the special relationship.

  Much more serious however was Smiley’s impression that some hint of the row had reached Martello by other routes, and that he would be able to exploit it. For example, Molly Meakin’s sources spoke of a burgeoning relationship between Enderby and Martello at the personal level, and not just because their children were all being educated at the Lycée in South Kensington. It seemed that the two men had taken to fishing together at weekends in Scotland, where Enderby had a bit of water. Martello supplied the plane, said the joke later, and Enderby supplied the fish. Smiley also learned around this time, in his unworldly way, what everyone else had known from the beginning and assumed he knew too. Enderby’s third and newest wife was American and rich. Before their marriage she had been a considerable hostess of the Washington establishment, a rôle she was now repeating with some success in London.

  But the underlying cause of everybody’s agitation was finally the same. On the Ko front, nothing ultimately was happening. Worse still, there was an agonising shortage of operational intelligence. Every day now, at ten o’clock, Smiley and Guillam presented themselves at the Annexe and every day came away less satisfied. Tiu’s domestic telephone line was tapped, so was Lizzie Worthington’s. The tapes were locally monitored, then flown back to London for detailed processing. Jerry had sweated Charlie Marshall on a Wednesday. On the Friday, Charlie was sufficiently recovered from his ordeal to ring Tiu from Bangkok and pour out his heart to him. But after listening for less than thirty seconds, Tiu cut him short with an instruction to “get in touch with Harry right away,” which left everybody mystified: nobody had a Harry anywhere.

  On the Saturday there was drama because the watch on Ko’s home number had him cancelling his regular Sunday-morning golf date with Mr. Arpego. Ko pleaded a pressing business engagement. This was it! This was the breakthrough! Next day, with Smiley’s consent, the Hong Kong Cousins locked a surveillance van, two cars, and a Honda on to Ko’s Rolls-Royce as it entered town. What secret mission at five-thirty on a Sunday morning was so important to Ko that he would abandon his weekly golf? The answer turned out to be his fortune-teller, a venerable old Swatownese who operated from a seedy spirit temple in a side-street off the Hollywood Road. Ko spent more than an hour with him before returning home, and though some zealous child inside the Cousins’ van trained a concealed directional microphone on the temple window for the entire session, the only sounds he recorded apart from the traffic turned out to be cluckings from the old man’s hen-house. Back at the Circus, di Salis was called in. What on earth would anyone be going to the fortune-teller at six in the morning for, least of all a millionaire?

  Greatly amused by their perplexity, di Salis twirled his hair in delight. A man of Ko’s standing would insist on being the first client in a fortune-teller’s day, he said, while the great man’s mind was still clear to receive the intimations of the spirits.

  Then nothing happened for five weeks. Nothing. The mail and phone checks spewed out wads of indigestible raw material which, when refined, produced not a single intelligence lead. Meanwhile the artificial deadline imposed by the Enforcement Agency drew steadily nearer, on which day Ko should become open game for whoever could pin something on him soonest.

  Yet Smiley kept his head. He resisted all recriminations, both of his own handling of the case and of Jerry’s. The tree had been shaken, he maintained, Drake Ko was running scared, and time would show they were right. He refused to be hustled into some dramatic gesture to Martello, and he held resolutely to the terms of the deal that he had outlined in his letter, and of which a copy now lodged with Lacon. He also refused, as his charter allowed him, to enter into any discussion of operational detail, either with the Steering Group or with Enderby personally, except where issues of protocol or local mandate were concerned. To give way on this, he knew very well, would only have meant providing the doubters with fresh ammunition with which to shoot him down.

  He held this line for five weeks, and on the thirty-sixth day, either God or the forces of logic—or better, the forces of Ko’s human chemistry—delivered to Smiley a substantial if mysterious consolation. Ko took to the water. Accompanied by Tiu and an unknown Chinese later identified as the lead captain of Ko’s junk-fleet, he spent the better part of three days touring the Hong Kong out-islands, returning each evening at dusk. Where they went, there was as yet no telling. Martello proposed a series of helicopter overflights to observe their course, but Smiley turned down the suggestion flat. Static surveillance from the quayside confirmed that they apparently left and returned by a different route each day, and that was all. And on the last day, the fourth, the boat did not return at all.

  Panic. Where had it gone? Martello’s masters in Langley, Virginia, flew into a complete spin and decided that Ko and the Admiral Nelson had deliberately strayed into China waters. Even that they had been abducted. Ko would never be seen again, and Enderby, going downhill fast, actually telephoned Smiley and told him it would be “your damn fault if Ko pops up in Peking yelling the odds about Secret Service persecution.” Even Smiley, for one agonising day, secretly wondered whether, against all reason, Ko had indeed gone to join his brother.

  Then of course, next morning early, the launch sailed back into the main harbour looking as if it had just returned from a regatta, and Ko gaily disembarked, following his beautiful Liese down the gangway.

  It was this intelligence which, after very long thought and a renewed and detailed reading of Ko’s file—not to mention much tense debate with Connie and di Salis—determined Smiley to take two decisions at once or, in gambler’s terms, to play the only two cards that were left to him.

  One: Jerry should advance to the “last stage,” by which Smiley meant Ricardo. He hoped by this step to maintain the pressure on Ko, and provide Ko, if he needed it, with the final proof that he must act.

  Two: Sam Collins should “go in.”

  This second decision was reached in consultation with Connie Sachs alone. It finds no mention in Jerry’s main dossier, but only in a secret appendix later released, with deletions, for wider scrutiny. />
  The fragmenting effect upon Jerry of these delays and hesitations was something not the greatest intelligence chief on earth could have included in his calculations. To be aware of it was one thing—and Smiley undoubtedly was, and even took one or two steps to forestall it. To be guided by it, to set it on the same plane as the factors of high policy which he was having daily fired at him, would have been downright irresponsible. A general is nothing without priorities.

  The fact remains that Saigon was the worst place on earth for Jerry to be kicking his heels. Periodically, as the delays dragged on, there was talk at the Circus of sending him somewhere more salubrious—for instance, to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur—but the arguments of expediency and cover always kept him where he was; besides, tomorrow everything might change. There was also the matter of his personal safety. Hong Kong was not to be considered, and in both Singapore and Bangkok, Ko’s influence was sure to be strong. Then, cover again: with the collapse approaching, where more natural than Saigon?

  Yet it was a half-life Jerry lived, and in a half-town. For forty years, give or take, war had been Saigon’s staple industry, but the American pull-out of ’73 had produced a slump from which, to the end, the city never properly recovered, so that even this longawaited final act, with its cast of millions, was playing to quite poor audiences. Even when he took his obligatory rides to the sharp end of the fighting, Jerry had a sense of watching a rainedoff cricket match where the contestants wanted only to go back to the pavilion. The Circus forbade him to leave Saigon on the grounds that he might be needed elsewhere at any moment, but the injunction, literally observed, would have made him look ridiculous, and he ignored it. Xuan Loc was a boring French rubber town fifty miles out, on what was now the city’s tactical perimeter. For this was a different war entirely from Phnom Penh’s, more technical and more European in inspiration. Where the Khmer Rouge had no armour, the North Vietnamese had Russian tanks and 130 millimetre artillery, which they drew up on the classic Russian pattern, wheel to wheel, as if they were about to storm Berlin under Marshal Zhukov, and nothing would move till the last gun was laid and primed. He found the town half deserted, and the Catholic church empty except for one French priest.